Dazzling and bright

Dallas' Perot Museum puts new shine on its crown-jewel attraction

Birthstone exhibit, Lyda Hill Gems and Minerals Hall, Perot Museum

The new birthstone exhibit in the Lyda Hill Gems and Minerals Hall.

Photo courtesy of Perot Museum

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science has put new polish and shine on one of its marquee attractions. The Lyda Hill Gems and Minerals Hall has been refreshed and reopened with four signature displays and a new initiative meant to attract the international spotlight.

The crown-jewel exhibit, which closed in early January for enhancements, reopened to the public on January 31 with a redesigned floor plan and new opportunities for guests to learn about the beautiful, rare gems and minerals on display.

The showpiece of the new display is a dazzling birthstone exhibit. A signature case highlights birthstones in both rough form (in its natural state from the ground) and faceted form (cut for artistry purposes), the museum explains. An additional display showcases exquisite jewelry created from the birthstones for each month. It will rotate 12 times per year.

Other highlights of the enhanced hall include:

A total of 37 cases, including four new signature displays with large, easy-to-use touchscreens that present information in both English and Spanish.
A larger case for The Eyes of Africa, a show-stopping “alien eye” fluorite from Namibia on loan from Lyda Hill. The case contains updated details about its intriguing backstory.
A case displaying the magnificent example of stibnite with robust clusters of crystal formations recovered from an industrial mine in the Jiangxi Province of China.
A premier case for the beloved “grape jelly” geode — a 5-foot-tall amethyst geode — that invites guests of all ages to crank it open for a glittering peek.

In addition, the luminescent “Aurora Butterfly of Peace” is on loan from owner and curator Alan Bronstein. The work of art is made up of 240 colored diamonds (some that fluoresce) in the shape of a butterfly that Bronstein says symbolizes a “spiritual connection to Earth for all humankind,” the museum says. With colors ranging from fiery orange to tranquil blue and rosy pink, the “Aurora Butterfly” took 12 years to create and is adorned with diamonds from nearly every continent on Earth, it says. On display through spring, the “Aurora Butterfly” is surrounded by a rainbow of mineral cases each dedicated to a different color.

A sampling of specimens from Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California is on display, along with those from countries around the world, including China, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Australia, and Afghanistan.

Another part of the gallery spotlights an array of minerals such as tourmaline, rhodochrosite, aquamarine, garnet, opal, fluorite, calcite, smithsonite, pyrite, and quartz.

“By bringing the world’s most exceptional gems and minerals to North Texas, we hope to inspire guests to more deeply connect with this fascinating science,” says Dr. Linda Silver, Eugene McDermott Chief Executive Officer of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, in a release. “With a revitalized and redesigned gallery and the addition of the new Gems and Minerals Center of Excellence, the Museum is positioned to attract the most significant pieces in the world. We will be a leading authority for gem and mineral education for years to come.”

A new initiative
The updated hall is just one step of the Perot Museum’s new strategic focus to shine internationally in the gems and minerals realm, museum officials say. The second effort will be its Gems and Minerals Center of Excellence, which "will elevate its status as a core for education and communication about the ever-changing sciences," the museum says.

Spearheading the second strategic initiative is Kimberly Vagner, who recently joined the museum as director of the Gems and Minerals Center of Excellence. She will curate the collection, guiding the museum's “loan-versus-own” method of displaying, creating ways to increase interest in gems and minerals, and developing educational programs for visitors of all ages.

The museum also has established the Perot Museum Gems and Minerals Legacy Award to recognize support for its Gems and Minerals Center of Excellence and outstanding contributions to the gems and minerals community. Lyda Hill is the 2019 recipient.

“Lyda Hill’s conviction that science holds the key to bettering the world for humanity led her to support the Perot Museum as a founding donor from the very beginning,” says McFarland in the release. “She supports the museum in many ways — among them, for nearly 15 years, she has loaned exquisite minerals to the Perot Museum collection for millions of guests to enjoy and in hopes of inspiring a deeper understanding of the scientific wonders of gems and minerals.”

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony