The Houston-based Apollo Chamber Players stress globally-inspired programming and have commissioned a great deal of new music with this aim. The group has performed well beyond Houston, including a concert in Cuba that made the Apollo Chamber Players the first American chamber group to perform in that country since 1960.

The Apollo Chamber Players were founded in 2004, and its members are violinists Matthew Detrick and Anabel Ramirez Detrick, violist Whitney Bullock, and cellist Matthew Dudzik. Notably, most of the members have organizational roles beyond performance; Matthew Detrick is the group's artistic director and executive director, while Bullock serves as education director, and Dudzik is Chief Financial Officer. The group held the Residency Partnership of Chamber Music America, and it has twice played sold-out concerts at New York's Carnegie Hall. Educational outreach is a major part of the group's work; it performs at such venues as schools, universities, at-risk youth centers, refugee, veteran, and autism organizations, hospitals, airports, and public libraries. The Apollo Chamber Players have collaborated with various artists, including the Houston Ballet, zither player Vanessa Vo, and clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski, and the group is often featured on the Performance Today program on the U.S. National Public Radio network. Its regular-season concerts, held at venues around the Houston area, are organized around national traditions, generally featuring new music relating to that tradition.

Much of that music has been commissioned by the Apollo Chamber Players. The group's largest commissioning endeavor has been the 20x2020 Project, begun in 2014 and features new works by major composers, including Libby Larsen, Christopher Theofanidis, and Jennifer Higdon. The project culminated with an online presentation of many of the works in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2014, the group released the first of four albums on the Navona Records label. It moved to Azica for the 2021 release With Malice Toward None, featuring music by Theofanidis, Pamela Z, Sergei Aslamazian, and other composers. ~ James Manheim, Rovi