His wartime job was designing camouflage paintings for the US Army Air Forces. Keats worked as a mural painter and comic book illustrator until he was drafted into the army during World War II. In his wallet were clippings of the awards that his son had won. Shortly before Keats was to receive an award for artistic excellence at his high school graduation, his father died of a heart attack. His artistic bent was evident from an early age, but his father discouraged the boy’s dream of being an artist. The film version – Amazon’s original holiday special, The Snowy Day – won two Emmys, two Kidscreen Awards and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts nomination.īorn to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Keats grew up poor in Brooklyn during the Depression. I had the real thing and, just as for Peter, the boy at the center of Ezra Jack Keats’s book upon which Thompson and librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney based their opera, for me the sight of snow was magical.Īpart from recalling the US postage stamps with illustrations of a child dressed all in red frolicking in the snow, I knew nothing of Keats or The Snowy Day, but it is a popular read: in January 2020, The Snowy Day was declared the most checked-out book in the 125-year history of the New York Public Library. In her opening remarks, Khori Dastoor, HGO’s General Director, said that through the magic of opera it could snow in Houston on a 78☏ day.

I woke up to snow on Christmas Eve – it was just the morning to watch Joel Thompson’s The Snowy Day, which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera on 9 December.

(RP) Raven McMillon (Peter) © Lynn Lane Photography United States Joel Thompson, The Snowy Day: Soloists, Houston Grand Opera Orchestra / Patrick Summers (conductor).

Houston grand opera songs