Month: April 2018

Lessons from High-Performing Organizations On Display at Curtis

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Brian MacNeice, co-author of Powerhouse: Insider Accounts Into the World’s Top High-Performance Organizations, visited Philadelphia in early April for speaking engagements at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Wharton School. Founder and managing director of Kotinos Partners, a strategy, organization, and leadership consulting firm based in Dublin, Mr. MacNeice advises international clients on driving improvements in the performance focus and culture of their businesses.

Speaking to audiences at Curtis on April 2 and at Wharton on April 3, he shared some of the fundamental principles of building a high-performance environment, gathered through immersive personal research at 12 elite organizations across the world, including the Curtis Institute of Music, the Mayo Clinic, New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team, Toyota, Doctors Without Borders, Southwest Airlines, and the U.S. Marine Corps.

Mr. MacNeice credited numerous aspects of the culture and teaching philosophy at Curtis as reasons for the school’s success, including the ambitious mission, feedback-rich culture, and dedication to continual improvement. Pulling from these lessons and those of other organizations profiled in Powerhouse, he presented the framework by which any organization can achieve excellence.

Learn more about the elements that help to make Curtis a Powerhouse.

Meet the Alumni: Amanda Majeski

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Meet Curtis alumna Amanda Majeski in this spring’s edition of Overtones.

Shortly after graduating in 2009 from the Curtis opera program, Amanda was thrust into the spotlight at the Lyric Opera of Chicago when she recieved the call to step in for a principal singer who had fallen ill. Despite only having sung the role once in rehearsal, she felt prepared to take the stage with confidence thanks to three years of training at Curtis, performing over a dozen roles.

Since that fateful night, Amanda’s career has taken off, leading to performances in Paris, Zurich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and more. A specialist in Mozart and Strauss, her 2018 season includes an appeance as Fiordiligi in the Metropolitan Opera’s Così fan tutte, and a return to Curtis on April 29 to perform Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

Read the full article, or visit curtis.edu/Overtones for more stories featuring Curtis’s notable students, faculty, and alumni.

To Be Heard: George Walker (Composition and Piano ’45)

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Curtis alumnus George Walker’s Lyric for Strings was performed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on April 29, and he received the President’s Alumni Award at Commencement in May. Fellow alumnus William Short (Bassoon ’10) asked Mr. Walker about his Curtis memories.

Evening lessons with Rudolf Serkin in a room “so dark you could hardly see the keys.” The Common Room, “so elegant, and so removed from all the things that one knew existed—bigotry even in churches, and in the restaurants—but when you walked in there, it was so peaceful and so elegant.”

Into this evocative environment entered the young George Walker (Piano and Composition ’45), who after graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, pianist, and advocate for social justice. His latest work, Sinfonia No. 5, deals with the 2015 Charleston church massacre; the National Symphony will premiere it in the 2019–20 season.

Initially admitted alongside longtime friend Seymour Lipkin (Piano ’47) as a piano student of Rudolf Serkin, George soon found himself unable to expend his seemingly boundless energy solely through piano-related pursuits: “I needed to do more than practice five hours a day.” He began to study composition with the legendary Rosario Scalero, whose insistence on starting every one of his students with the fundamentals of counterpoint fascinated George. “The more linear aspects of writing,” while not necessarily of interest to every composer of his generation, were definitely of interest to him. He made it his goal “to infuse what I do with some of these elements which are considered archaic,” but to use them “so that they don’t seem academic.”

Impressively for a man who, in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, has been awarded seven honorary doctorates (including one from Curtis, in 1997) and two Guggenheim Fellowships and has been inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, among numerous other accolades, George’s most earnest desire is “just to have people hear my music. That’s all I want.”

—William Short (’10), principal bassoon of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra

 

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On the Other Side of Locust Street

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In the Spring issue of Overtones, organ student Clara Gerdes writes about her real-world training experience as an organ scholar at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, across the street from Curtis’s Lenfest Hall. Clara and fellow Curtis organ student Bryan Dunnewald play an important role within the ambitious sacred music program at the church: accompanying hymns, improvising service music, playing preludes and postludes, and conducting the choirs. “For most organists, and certainly for me and Bryan, the skills of our trade will involve church playing and choir training,” Clara notes. “In learning how to be good assistants, Bryan and I have started to gain many of the skills we need to be good leaders in our profession.”

Read the full article, or visit Curtis.edu/Overtones for more stories of Curtis students, faculty, and alumni.