An Evening with the Stars

Stanton Welch AM was born in Melbourne to Marilyn Jones OBE and Garth Welch AM, two of Australia's most gifted dancers of the 1960s and 1970s.  He joined The Australian Ballet, rising to the rank of leading soloist and performing various principal roles, before serving as Resident Choreographer. During his decades long career, Welch has choreographed over 100 works including audience favorites Madame Butterfly (1995), Clear (2001), and Divergence (1994). His work can be seen in the repertoire of The Australian Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Birmingham Royal Ballet, among others. In July 2003, Welch was appointed Artistic Director of Houston Ballet, America's fourth-largest ballet company. Welch has choreographed more than 40 works for Houston Ballet, including Marie (2009) and spectacular stagings of Swan Lake (2006), La Bayadère (2010), Romeo and Juliet (2015), Giselle (2016), The Nutcracker (2016), Sylvia (2019), and Raymonda (2025). Developing Houston Ballet into a choreographic Eden, Welch has commissioned over 30 works from notable choreographers such as Mark Morris, Aszure Barton, Dwight Rhoden, Trey McIntyre, and Justin Peck, while expanding the company’s repertoire with works from internationally acclaimed choreographers including George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Jiří Kylián, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier, Twyla Tharp, and Jerome Robbins. Under Welch’s leadership, Houston Ballet has appeared across the globe including recent engagements in Tokyo, Dubai, Melbourne, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Welch continues to nurture the next generation of artists through the Houston Ballet Academy, a leading institution in dance education and training. 

A musical prodigy from the age of six, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is considered by many to be the greatest musician of all time. His legions of works include famous pieces for symphonies and operas, choral and piano; nearly every piece is considered a masterpiece of the classical music form.

International acclaim is nothing new for Mozart. Believing him a gift of God, his father exhibited Mozart’s manifest talents to the world. Acclaimed in his own era, Mozart was well regarded as a man of unique musical abilities and talents by his contemporaries.

His works were prodigious. Beginning at age 10, Mozart composed fifty symphonies during his life. In his youth, he was knighted by the Pope and performed for the King and Queen of England. Gifted with “perfect pitch,” Mozart’s inborn abilities as a natural musician became increasingly evident the older he grew. Other seemingly supernatural gifts were equally stunning. It was not uncommon for young Mozart to pick up an instrument and play it without a single lesson.

At twenty-five, Mozart married and settled in his homeland of Austria. Although Emperor Joseph of Austria briefly employed him, Mozart struggled to clothe and feed his family. Ironically enough, the emperor clothed Mozart in fine apparel and bestowed upon him the gift of a large ring to be worn during performances.

Mozart wrote every genre of music known to him, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music, church music, operas, and operettas—most of which are regarded as masterpieces today. Among his most acclaimed works are the operas Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro. Although Mozart died at the age of thirty-five, his legacy on western music is profound: not just in terms of sheer numbers, but in their emotional impact, his works include the frivolous and lively to the solemn and morose.

Born in Bendigo, Australia, Alice started dancing at the age of four. After two years dancing with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, she joined The Australian Ballet as a dancer in 2007, where her choreographic identity first emerged. Her first work, Trace, was created for The Australian Ballet’s 2010 season of its choreographic showcase ‘Bodytorque’. Between 2011 and 2014, Alice created three more works for Bodytorque, refining her craft and gaining the attention of critics and company directors alike. In 2016, Alice choreographed the critically acclaimed work Little Atlas, appearing on The Australian Ballet’s main-stage. In 2018, she created her first one act work Aurum with the support of a Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance. Aurum went on to its international debut the following year at New York’s leading contemporary dance venue, The Joyce Theater. Alice was appointed one of The Australian Ballet’s Resident Choreographers in 2018. In 2019, she was invited to spend a month with Studio Wayne McGregor in the UK, creating a piece for The Grange Festival. Since retiring as a dancer, Alice has created works for West Australian Ballet, Royal NZ Ballet, The Australian Ballet, Singapore Ballet, Tulsa Ballet and Ballett Companie Oldenburg. In 2025, she created her first full-length narrative work for the West Australian Ballet, Butterfly Effect, to outstanding acclaim. Alice has been nominated for a Green Room Award and three Australian Dance Awards. In 2019, Aurum saw Alice and her creative team win the Helpmann Award for Best Ballet and earn a nomination for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.

Estonian-born Arvo Pärt (1935) is one of these composers whose creative output has significantly changed the way we understand the nature of music. Since 1976, his unique tintinnabuli compositions have established a new kind of musical paradigm – a radically different approach to many aspects of music, as well as to interpretation and listening. 

As one of the most radical representatives of the Soviet avantgarde, Pärt’s work passed through a profound evolutionary process: from neo-classical piano music to the individual use of dodecaphony, composition with sound masses, chance music and collage technique.

After his last and most dramatic collage piece Credo (1968), Pärt withdrew for almost eight years. In 1976, after intensive study of Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame School and classic vocal polyphony, he emerged with a new and highly original musical language which he called tintinnabuli (tintinnabulum – Latin for ’little bell’) and which has defined his work up to today. 

Tintinnabuli first appeared in a short piano piece Für Alina (1976), a subsequent rush of new works included Fratres, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and Tabula rasa (1977), which remain among his most highly regarded.

In 1980 Arvo Pärt was urged by public authorities to leave the country.  He and his family settled first in Vienna and then West Berlin. Important works like Passio, Te Deum, Miserere, Lamentate, Symphonie No. 4, Adam’s Lament, and numerous choral works have been created ever since and have been performed worldwide.

His ‘musical Credo’ is rooted in the Christian tradition, and since the Word (Logos) plays a vital and even structural role in Pärt’s compositional process, both his orchestral and vocal works are mostly based on liturgical texts. Pärt’s oeuvre is rich and versatile, including many large-scale compositions for choir and orchestra, four symphonies and works for soloists and orchestra, as well as numerous choral pieces and chamber music. 

Jerome Robbins is world renowned for his work as a choreographer of ballets as well as his work as a director and choreographer in theater, movies and television. His Broadway shows include On the Town, Billion Dollar Baby, High Button Shoes, West Side Story, The King and I, Gypsy, Peter Pan, Miss Liberty, Call Me Madam, and Fiddler on the Roof. His last Broadway production in 1989, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, won six Tony Awards including best musical and best director. Among the more than 60 ballets he created are Fancy Free, Afternoon of a Faun, The Concert, Dances at a Gathering, In the Night, In G Major, Other Dances, Glass Pieces and Ives, Songs, which are in the repertories of New York City Ballet and other major dance companies throughout the world. His last ballets include A Suite of Dances created for Mikhail Baryshnikov (1994), 2 & 3 Part Inventions (1994), West Side Story Suite (1995), and Brandenburg (1996). In addition to two Academy Awards for the film West Side Story, Mr. Robbins received four Tony Awards, five Donaldson Awards, two Emmy Awards, the Screen Directors’ Guild Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Mr. Robbins was a 1981 Kennedy Center Honors Recipient and was awarded the French Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la legion d’Honneur. Mr. Robbins died in 1998.

Considered the greatest composer of the Romantic period, Frédéric Chopin was born on March 1, 1810, in a small village near Warsaw, Poland. His father was a French schoolteacher who immigrated to Poland, where he met and married Chopin's mother. Chopin’s extraordinary talent as a musician was apparent at a very young age. By the age of 7, he was already composing music on the piano, as well as performing publicly. Although he did compose a chamber of pieces, Chopin was more vastly well-known and sought after for his work on the piano, which included 51 mazurkas, 12 polonaises, 17 waltzes, 19 nocturnes. Nocturne, Prelude & Piano Sonata are some of his more famous pieces today. The expression of beauty interpersonal turmoil, and heroism throughout his music earned him the respect and friendship of some of his more notable peers. Like many great composers, Chopin suffered an untimely death. After touring through England and Scotland, he contracted tuberculosis and died on October 17, 1849 in Paris, France at the age of 39.