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The Curtis Institute of Music, situated at 1726 Locust Street, Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and home to approximately a hundred and sixty students, was founded in 1924. This private music conservatory, founded by Mary Louise Curtis Bok and named after her publisher father, Cyrus Curtis, is currently celebrating its centenary season.
The 2024 release of Curtis Studio's acclaimed fifth recording, A Century of New Sounds, celebrates the Curtis Institute's longstanding and ever-evolving history and legacy of commissioning new works. It's part of the institute's one hundredth anniversary season, which continues until May 2025.
The school will present the final compositions in its multi-year project to commission one hundred works for the centennial. Since 2008, Curtis has commissioned more than a hundred new works, and 100 for 100 celebrates the music of our time with a showcase of fresh perspectives featuring cutting-edge original works by alumni composers such as Paul Brantley (1985), Stephen Cabell (2008), Sebastian Chang (2007), Chelsea Komschlies (2018), Riho Esko Maimets (2014), James Ra (2004), Dai Wei (2019), Alyssa Weinberg (2016), Elizabeth Younan (2021), and Tian Zhou (2005), inspired by and crafted specifically for Curtis for this once-in-a-lifetime landmark celebration.
Dai Wei
Roberto Díaz (viola, 1984), president and CEO of Curtis, says:
New music is embedded in the history of this school and has been a part of what Curtis is, and has done for a hundred years now, having historically from the very beginning supported some of the greatest American composers of the twentieth century. There is so much new music being written and performed at Curtis, and we have some of the leading [artists] of our time. It is the best place to have new music brought out into the world because the performances are fantastic.
Roberto Díaz
Nick DiBerardino (Composition 2018), Curtis New Music Ensemble director, composer, chair of composition studies, and provost and dean of the conservatory, says:
Curtis' 100 for 100 is a project that was designed to make sure that Curtis has commissioned one hundred works by the time it turns one hundred. As we look backward at the impact that Curtis has had on the field, we can also look forward and think about what we want to leave for the next hundred years of music. As we're thinking about the centennial at Curtis, we're thinking about the impact the school has had in the past. We also want to think ahead, and commissioning is an important part of how we can contribute to the future of this art form that we all love.
Nick DiBerardino
On Saturday 15 February 2025 at 7pm, Curtis New Music Ensemble's 2024-25 series continues with Bold Experiment, a concert featuring musical and academic explorations of the twentieth century, including works by Curtis alumni, inspired by the 'bold experiment' initiated by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1924 when she opened a conservatory in Philadelphia.
The programme opens with Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos' Choros No 2 for flute and clarinet, inspired by the improvisatory music of Rio de Janeiro's street musicians. This short, spiky, syncopated piece is followed by composer Ruth Crawford Seeger's final work, her playful Suite for Wind Quintet, winner of the 1952 National Association for American Composers and Conductors' composition prize.
Ruth Crawford Seeger
The concert continues with two piano works for two pianists - Meredith Monk's Folkdance and Ellis Island, the improvisatory Buddha by Curtis alumnus Julius Eastman (1963) and Du Yun's The Ocean Within for solo harp.
Du Yun
The evening closes with George Crumb's foreboding 'voyage of the soul', Black Angels, for electric string quartet.
Curtis Opera Theatre presents Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte's timeless masterpiece, Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), on Thursday and Friday 27-28 February 2025, 7pm and Saturday and Sunday 1-2 March 2025, 2pm, at the Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Love, intrigue, and politics hilariously collide on the eve of Figaro and Susanna's wedding. Conductor Nicholas McGegan and director Marcus Shields return to Curtis to lead a cast of young opera stars and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.
Nicholas McGegan
Based on the enormously popular play by French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais, this 'sequel' to The Barber of Seville revolutionized opera at its first performance in 1786 by merely existing. Banned in Vienna after its first performance, it is now hailed as one of the greatest comic operas ever written.
Set in a single, ever-evolving space, the Curtis production combines sleek, contemporary design with a narrative-driven focus, reinterpreting this timeless comedy for modern audiences. Through its exploration of gender roles, class struggles, power dynamics and fidelity, the world of Figaro unfolds in twists and turns as its captivating characters navigate the messy complexities of human relationships. Mozart's ingenious comedy - brimming with mistaken identities, secrets, disguises, lovers, and intrigues - boldly challenged eighteenth-century norms with its daring portrayal of servants and nobility, tackling themes that remain strikingly relevant today.
The Curtis Presents series resumes on Thursday 13 March 2025 at 7:30pm in Field Concert Hall with a performance from the Rosamunde String Quartet for an evening of chamber music.
The Rosamunde Quartet
Also featured are young stars from some of the world's greatest orchestras: Noah Bendix-Balgley, first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic; Shanshan Yao (violin 2008), concert violinist and former member of the Pittsburgh Symphony and New York Philharmonic; Teng Li (viola 2005), principal viola player of Chicago Symphony; and Nathan Vickery (cello 2013), cellist in the New York Philharmonic.
The concert features Ludwig van Beethoven's late masterpiece, the elegant, rhythmically mischievous String Quartet in D, Op 18 No 3; Béla Bartók's transcendent String Quartet No 3, Sz 85; and Franz Schubert's intensely soulful String Quartet No 14 in D minor, D 810 ('Death and the Maiden'), written as the dying composer wrestled with his demons, despair and mortality.
Curtis Opera Theatre's 2024-25 series concludes on Friday 11 April 2025, 7pm, and Sunday 13 April 2025, 2pm, with Candide by Curtis alumnus Leonard Bernstein (conducting 1941). Conductor David Charles Abell and theatre and opera director Emma Griffin, managing artistic director of Mannes Opera, lead the cast and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in this clever adaptation of Voltaire's philosophical French novella.
David Charles Abell
Filled with razor sharp wit, soaring melodies and globe-trotting grandeur, Bernstein's outrageous, wildly entertaining philosophical operetta is an absurdist romp across 'the best of all possible worlds', drawing on classic vaudeville tropes and layering them with irony, to satirize the rampant excesses of a materialistic society in the Age of Enlightenment and the post-World War II boom years. Featuring iconic songs like 'Glitter and Be Gay' and 'Make Our Garden Grow', Candide's tale of youthful innocence and human folly in war-torn times of crisis is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1759.
The 2024-25 Curtis Presents series closes on Wednesday 23 April 2025, 7:30pm in Field Concert Hall with a concert featuring pianist Michelle Cann (piano 2013 and Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies at Curtis) and Imani Winds, consisting of Curtis faculty members Brandon Patrick George, flute, Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe, Mark Dover, clarinet, Kevin Newton, horn and Monica Ellis, bassoon.
Imani Winds and Michelle Cann
On the programme is Paquito D'Rivera's A Little Cuban Jazz Waltz, the first Philadelphia performance of the Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano by Curtis alumnus Viet Cuong (composition 2019), Francis Poulenc's whimsical Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano, Valerie Coleman's six-movement Portraits of Langston for flute, clarinet and piano, and finally, another Poulenc work, the French composer's jazzy Sextet for Piano and Winds, Op 100.
On Saturday 26 April 2025, 2pm, Curtis alumna and pianist Yuja Wang (2008) joins the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin - head of conducting at Curtis - for the final performance of the orchestra's 2024-25 series, 'Yuja Wang Plays Rautavaara'.
Lili Boulanger's joyful D'un Matin de printemps ('Of a Spring Morning') opens the concert, conducted by first-year Rita E Hauser Conducting Fellow, Mariana Corichi Gomez.
Yuja Wang's performance of Einojuhani Rautavaara's Piano Concerto No 1 (1969) follows - a powerful work that juxtaposes raw, primal energy with quiet, reflective beauty. This post-modernist triumph features soaring melodies, sharp dissonances and explosive palm and forearm clusters that shock and thrill. Filled with unbridled tension and aching romanticism, the concerto's relentless interplay between the piano and orchestra builds to a rhythmically charged, breathless finale.
Yuja Wang
Maurice Ravel's sumptuous orchestral song cycle Shéhérazade, inspired by the wildly imaginative tales of The Arabian Nights, follows. This lush musical travelogue features a guest appearance by mezzo-soprano Judy Zhou, who is Horace W Goldsmith Fellow at Curtis. The concert concludes with French impressionist composer Claude Debussy's childhood recollections of the sea, the atmospheric symphonic sketches, La mer.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin
On 8 May 2025, opera singers mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges (2012), soprano Amanda Majeski (2009), baritone Jarrett Ott (2004) and soprano Karen Slack (2002) will headline the Curtis annual gala, alongside pianist Miloš Repický, Director and Hirsig Family Chair in Vocal Studies and Opera, at Philadelphia's landmark archeological and anthropological institution, the Penn Museum.
Karen Slack
The Curtis Centennial Gala will honour the school's hundred-year legacy of singing, vocal music and opera, highlighting the music and influential artists that have shaped the culture of Curtis and the world's classical music landscape. Guests will experience captivating performances while savoring culinary delights and commemorating Curtis' profound impact on the global music landscape.
Curtis' 2024-25 Centennial Season: Great to Groundbreaking concludes with the final concert of the Curtis New Music Ensemble's series with 'Infernal Angel & Savior' on Friday 9 May 2025 (a newly added date) and Saturday 10 May 2025 - both 7pm at Gould Rehearsal Hall. The performance features the first performance of Infernal Angel, focused on the life of Gille de Rais, the notorious fifteenth century medieval knight turned serial killer, by composer, poet, filmmaker, singer, director and Curtis composition faculty member Amy Beth Kirsten.
Amy Beth Kirsten
This Curtis-commissioned chamber piece will be paired with another new full-length theatrical work by the same composer, Savior, inspired by the mystical life and death of de Rais' comrade-in-arms, Joan of Arc. Initially commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW with support from the Toulmin Foundation. Savior features the talents of guest artist Ty Bouque as Gille de Rais alongside Curtis vocalists and chamber ensemble.
Please note that as of late January 2025, several of the concerts mentioned in this article are sold out: Bold Experiment, Rosamunde String Quartet and 'Michelle Cann & Imani Winds'. Join the waitlist to be notified if/when additional tickets for these events become available.
Further information: curtis.edu
Posted 24 January 2025 by Keith Bramich