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The annual Basically Beethoven Festival, formerly known as the Fine Arts Chamber Players, will be hosting its 43rd iteration this month on July 14, 21, and 28. The festival includes three chamber music concerts that will feature many of Dallas’ top professional musicians as well as pre-professional rising stars. And this year, two of Meadows’ own voice students, Diego Roberts Buceta and Lexi Cook, have been selected as the “Rising Star” performers for the July 21 concert.

This collaboration started with Meadows’ “Curtain Up!” concert this spring, an event designed to introduce the SMU community to the world of musical theatre and get Mustangs excited for the Sexton Institute for Musical Theatre, in which Buceta and Cook were chosen to sing a duet together for the show. 

“Diego and I sang ‘If I Loved You’ from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel for the concert, a timeless duet with more depth to it than audiences might think,” explains Cook, a current senior in the undergraduate voice program. “It was a really amazing experience to explore this piece and put it together, and I feel we learned a lot about ourselves and each other during this process.” 

Meadows voice students Diego Roberts Buceta (tenor) and Lexi Cook (soprano).

After this initial partnership, voice professor Virginia Dupuy helped curate personalized repertoires designed to suit Buceta and Cook, as both people and performers, for their “Rising Star” performances in the Basically Beethoven concert.

“Diego and Lexi both came to SMU with a great amount of performing experience and they are two of our top-of-the-charts singing actors,” says Dupuy, who recruited both students to the voice program at Meadows. 

During their performances at the Basically Beethoven Festival, Buceta and Cook will each sing two arias from their repertoire that they feel showcase their voices and personalities. Buceta will perform arias from Bellini’s Bianca e Fernando and Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, while Cook will perform arias from Strauss’ Die Fledermaus and Puccini’s La Bohéme.

“The opportunity to sing at the Basically Beethoven festival is exciting and putting my practice into performance at this concert comes with challenges that lead to growth,” says Buceta. “Tons of preparation goes into a performance such as this, including daily vocal training, translating, memorizing, and the collaboration with our talented pianist, Kara Solis.”

The 2024 Basically Beethoven Festival will be hosted at Moody Performance Hall in Dallas starting at 2:30 p.m. on July 14, 21, and 28. You can see all Buceta and Cook’s hard work and preparation come to fruition at their Basically Beethoven performance on July 21. All three of Basically Beethoven’s chamber concerts are free to attend, with no ticket required for admission. For more information and to RSVP, .