2018 Year In Review

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2018 Year in Review

As 2018 draws to a close, we at Curtis are feeling grateful—for a wonderful year of music-making and learning, and for the support of our audiences and donors, who are so important to the education of our exceptionally gifted students. This extraordinary year has brought successful tours, prestigious awards for students and alumni, and innovative ways to reach audiences around the globe and in our own community. Review the year with us in photos below, with our thanks!

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Season Selections 2017-18

Curtis students and alumni are making waves throughout the musical world by winning major competitions, appointments, and honors! Enjoy musical highlights from the past season, demonstrating the unparalleled music-making that takes place at Curtis, including orchestra, opera, and chamber music.

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In the season of giving, consider Curtis

Your generosity this holiday season will allow us to foster the next generation of artist-citizens and increase their impact on the world. Your gift will go to work right away to support our extraordinary young musicians and retain our world-class faculty. Without your participation, Curtis would simply not be where it is today!

A unique full-tuition scholarship policy keeps Curtis at the forefront of the world’s conservatories by ensuring that admissions are based on artistic promise alone. With no tuition revenue, Curtis is indebted to countless donors who have followed in the footsteps of founder Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Your contribution of any amount can make an impact on the health and vibrancy of the world’s leading conservatory and the musical lives of its students.

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Curtis Announces Performance Certificate in Improvisation

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PHILADELPHIA, PA—December 4, 2018—As a new offering in the 2018–19 school year, the Curtis Institute of Music has established a performance certificate program in improvisation, designed to give existing Curtis students an additional tool for community and audience engagement. Noam Sivan, a notable pioneer in the revival of improvisation in the classical music world and a Curtis faculty member since 2009, will direct the program.

The school has incorporated improvisation into its curriculum over the past several years, prior to the creation of the new certificate program. “Improvisation develops confidence and imagination, and most importantly, it allows our students to apply their knowledge of harmony, counterpoint and ear training to actual playing and performing,” says Jonathan Coopersmith, chair of musical studies at Curtis. “I’m extremely proud that Curtis is offering the first improvisation certificate in North American higher education designed specifically for classical musicians.”

Available to students pursuing any major, the program provides enrollees with individual improvisation lessons and opportunities to perform improvised works on the weekly Student Recital Series, both as soloists and in chamber ensembles. Over the course of two years, students will acquire practical skills in the grammar of improvisation, achieve a solid understanding of musical structure, and develop a personal voice. Collaboration will play a key role in the learning process, as students enhance their ensemble skills through chamber improvisation, develop creative concert programming, and explore partnerships with practitioners of other art forms.

A reinforcement of Curtis’s mission to educate and train exceptionally gifted young musicians to engage a local and global community through the highest level of artistry, the ability to improvise opens new avenues for concert programming, music pedagogy, and collaborative efforts. Proficiency in improvisation serves as a complement to students’ participation in the artist-citizen curriculum, launched at Curtis in 2014 to equip students with the essential skills they need as musicians in the 21st century.

The performance certificate in improvisation is the second supplementary certificate available to Curtis students. Having recognized supplementary harpsichord study since 2001, Curtis now offers a certificate in historical performance practice under the direction of faculty members Leon Schelhase and Matthew Glandorf.

Director of Improvisation Noam Sivan is a composer, pianist, improviser, conductor, and interdisciplinary artist who has been featured in venues internationally, including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, Paris’s Salle Cortot, Montreal’s Schulich Hall, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Ravinia Festival, and Tel Aviv Museum.

A notable pioneer in the revival of improvisation in the classical music world, Dr. Sivan has given evening-length improvised piano recitals; conducted orchestral improvisations; and collaborated on multidisciplinary improvisations with musicians, singers, dancers, and actors. His 2017 album Ambiro’s Journey, the first-ever piano improvisation studio album featuring more than 70 minutes of continuous music recorded in a single unedited take, has been described as “a new marker in the evolution of improvisation.” In 2013 he became the first musician from North America invited to perform and lecture at the all-European ERASMUS Improvisation Intensive Project in the Netherlands.

As a pianist, Dr. Sivan premiered his own piano concerto in the triple role of soloist, conductor, and composer. He performed Bach’s Goldberg Variations, followed by his live improvisation on the piece, for an Israeli national TV broadcast. He gave the Asian premiere of the Viktor Ullmann piano concerto with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. His compositions have been presented by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Biennial Festival, Mannes Opera, New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Horszowski Trio, and many others.

Born in Israel, Dr. Sivan holds a doctorate from the Juilliard School, where he is also on faculty. He has taught at Mannes College of Music for ten years, and joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in 2009.

The Curtis Institute of Music educates and trains exceptionally gifted young musicians to engage a local and global community through the highest level of artistry. One of the most selective schools in the United States, Curtis accepts four percent of applicants each year on average. A tuition-free policy ensures that talent and artistic promise are the only considerations for admission. With a small student body of about 175, Curtis ensures that each young musician receives an education of unparalleled quality, distinguished by personalized attention from a celebrated faculty and a “learn by doing” philosophy. Curtis students hone their craft through than 200 orchestra, opera, and solo and chamber music offerings each year in Philadelphia and around the world.

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New Quartet in Residence and Fellows Named for 2018–19

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The Vera Quartet has been named Curtis’s string quartet in residence for 2018–19 and 2019–20. Recently added to the roster of Astral Artists, the quartet comes to Curtis with a long list of accomplishments, including winning the grand prize at the Plowman and Yellow Springs chamber music competitions. In October 2018, the quartet announced the addition of violinist and Curtis alumna Rebecca Anderson (Violin ’13).

Yuwon Kim, from Daegu, South Korea, enters Curtis as the newest conducting fellow, joining conducting fellow Yue Bao, who entered Curtis in 2017. Winner of the 2014 Robert Spano Conductor Prize and the 2018 Princess Astrid International Music Competition, Ms. Kim has worked with numerous orchestras, including the Zürich Tonhalle, Netherlands Philharmonic, and Prague Symphony Orchestra.

Three Curtis graduates have been named Community Artist Fellows for 2018–19. Nozomi Imamura (Trumpet ’15) returns for a second fellowship year, along with Seula Lee (Violin ’18) and Nicholas DiBerardino (Composition ’18). They will work with community partners in Philadelphia to provide rich artistic experiences to underserved communities.

Learn more about the Community Artist Fellows

An Exciting Weekend at the Young Artist Summer Program

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What an incredible weekend! Friday was our first faculty recital, which featured a percussion-heavy program, including a violin-percussion sonata written by our very own YASP faculty Jonathan Bailey Holland. Then on Saturday, participants presented their first chamber recital, where six chamber ensembles performed the pieces they’d been working on throughout the week, with their families and peers in the audience.

Saturday also saw our first orchestra recital, led by the head conductor of YASP, Paul Bryan. The first piece was Samuel Barber’s Symphonic March—scored for symphonic band, the March showcases the woodwinds, brass and percussion sections. The second work on the program was George Walker’s touching and sentimental Lyric for Strings, for string orchestra. The YASP orchestra followed in the footsteps of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, which performed Lyric for Strings with Dr. Walker in attendance earlier this year. The full orchestra came together by the third and final work of the afternoon, Manuel de Falla’s spirited Three-cornered Hat Suite.

Sunday was jam-packed with activities for our participants. In the morning, students jumped at the opportunity to play for some of their peers in our first open performance, which offers a place to perform in a low-stress, casual environment among their friends.

Later in the afternoon, all of our composers took a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they experienced Network for New Music featuring the premiere of a brand new work: composer Pierre Jalbert’s Light, Line, Shadow was written as a response to Edward Hopper’s painting Road and Trees. Other participants took a trip to Penn Treaty Park, where they sat on the grass and watched a performance by the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra brass and percussion sections. The park was also filled with food tents and activities such as bounce houses and face-painting!

It was an exciting and busy first weekend, and everyone here at YASP is ready and rearing to go onto our second week!

—Mary Kim, Princeton Intern for Civic Service

To learn more about the Young Artist Summer Program, visit curtis.edu/YASP.

Meet the Sphinx Performance Academy Community Advisors

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At Curtis Summerfest programs, Community Advisors serve in residential roles, such as watching over the wellbeing of participants and acting as mediators between students and faculty. Many of the Community Advisors for this year’s Sphinx Performance Academy are themselves former participants of SPA, and have happily found their way back to the program years later.

Maeve, a participant during both the 2010 and 2011 programs, looks back upon her time at SPA with nothing but fondness seven years later.

She notes how different the program is currently in comparison to when she had done it years before, regarding how far it has come and how much it has developed. New to the program as of 2016 are music theory classes that have been incorporated into the SPA curriculum, to ensure that the students have a holistic understanding of music past what is printed on their sheets. In a similar vein, the program continues to invite high profile artists to administer master classes and lead seminars in order to perpetually enrich the students’ musical experiences.

Conversely, even as the program continues to improve and grow, many aspects have remained very much the same. For one thing, the people have not changed. This 2018 program is a reunion between Maeve and fellow CA Annia, who met for the first time at the 2010 SPA program where they played the first movement of the Dvorak American String Quartet together. Coincidentally, the string quartet was coached by Karlos Rodriguez, the cellist of the Catalyst Quartet, who continues to be among the faculty of SPA to this day. This kind of consistency in SPA’s membership is indicative of the high level of devotion and dedication that the program inspires, as former participants jump at the chance to return to the program in some capacity even after they have entered their professional fields.

Maeve remarks that she is excited to come back to SPA as a colleague of her former mentors, as she had been wanting to return to the Sphinx program for a while. She is most looking forward to seeing all the changes that the program has gone through, to see how it has expanded and grown since she was a part of it many years ago.

Regarding SPA’s collaboration with Curtis, she is uplifted to see the extent of the involvement of the Summerfest staff in the ongoings of the SPA program. “It’s really an all hands on deck kind of situation,” she notes.

Linton, currently enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston, is another alumnus of the SPA program who returned as a Community Advisor this year. He first became involved with the Sphinx Organization in 2015 as a participant in SPA that summer, and has continued to attend conferences and competitions with Sphinx.

Linton is a violinist studying Music Therapy, and has recently wrapped up his sophomore year this May. He is interested in using music as a therapeutic medium to facilitate communication and motor skills. For individuals with Aspergers Syndrome or autism, music can be utilized as a way to communicate needs or wants that may be difficult to express through words; music therapy is also effective in treating patients with dementia, and can serve as a method to help recover lost memories.

He knew that he wanted to pursue a career in music since his sophomore year of high school. Linton attended SPA the summer after his junior year, and he credits his experience there as improving his technical skills and nurturing his musicianship. “It’s a space to be pushed”, he says, simply but firmly. “We were pushed to practice, and that made it an environment to grow.”

That summer was also responsible for consolidating his decision to pursue music, and demonstrating to him how hard he needed to work to make it happen. He recalls that it was “the first time I realized that there are other people out there that want it as bad as you do, and you have to put in a lot of work.” Linton also gives a nod to the kind of environment that Sphinx cultivates by choosing to provide opportunities specifically for Black and Latino students: “There were so many people like me, interested in music. I felt like I could relate.”

Regarding his role as a Community Advisor, someone that is responsible for the residential life and general wellbeing of the students in the program, he is excited to be supportive and inspiring towards the students. He wants to encourage them to take advantage of all of the opportunities and resources that SPA provides, and to treasure and appreciate the experience to the fullest.

He is also interested to see how the students will respond to being at a renowned institution in Curtis—how it will push them, and how it will inspire them. He hopes that experience will set an example for some of them as to where they want to be professionally, and where they can achieve if they put in the work to get there.

Annia is another CA at this summer’s Sphinx Performance Academy, and is also set to be a Dorm Parent at SPA’s next program in July at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She participated in SPA for four years, her last year being when she was 17. She is currently teaching seventh and eighth grade science, and has previously taught first and sixth grade.

When asked why she chose to come back to SPA after so many years, Annia’s face broke into a large smile. “I love Sphinx so, so much. I looked forward to it every single summer as a kid, and I’ve always been trying to come back to it.”

“It made me want to be a better musician, because I would want to show up every summer having improved, and wanting to play harder pieces.”

Since she last participated in SPA, Annia notices a greater variety in the guest artists that visit in order to give masterclasses to the SPA students. “It used to be mostly faculty, people that were already there.” The collaboration with Curtis also provides the opportunity to meet and interact with Curtis faculty and students, and have them be resources for the young aspiring musicians.

Zach is the 2018 Curtis Summerfest Business and Finance intern, and this is his third year on the Summerfest staff. He became involved with the program the summer after his freshman year, and speaks emphatically to the strides it has made since he first joined the team two years ago. The program admits musicians of increasing caliber each year, and continues to invite world-renowned faculty and guest artists to teach and to perform. On the administrative side, financial aid opportunities have increased significantly, record-keeping databases have been systematized, and even the website has improved dramatically in this short period.

Although Zach has never participated in SPA as a student, he is familiar with the Sphinx Organization—their base in Detroit is not far from the University of Michigan, where he studies. Over the last three years, he has been in conversation with Sphinx, speaking on behalf of multiple school organizations that focus on providing musical education to underrepresented and underprivileged youth, much as Sphinx does. These organizations have reached out to Sphinx, asking for consultations to see if their freshly-minted programs are on track, or if they are handling things well from an administrative perspective.

He emphasizes the generosity of the Sphinx Organization, in their continued dedication and support. “The mission of Sphinx is first and foremost celebrating diversity in the arts. They don’t see other organizations with similar goals as competition or hold back in aiding them, because they understand that they are promoting something that is bigger than themselves.”

Similar to Linton, Zach has high expectations of the SPA-Summerfest collaboration, believing that visiting Curtis itself will inspire the kids to work hard and “ignite the flame.” He also considers the collaboration mutually advantageous, in that the two organizations can learn from each other administratively and programmatically, and integrate successful aspects of each respective program into their own.

—Mary Kim, Princeton Intern for Civic Service

To learn more about the Sphinx Performance Academy, visit curtis.edu/Sphinx.

Sphinx Performance Academy at Curtis Summerfest is generously supported, in part, by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation.

Category: Admissions