In the first of a three-part series beginning in Sunday’s (12/4) Philadelphia Inquirer, Peter Dobrin writes, “Sitting on the eastern edge of Rittenhouse Square on almost any day can mean a serendipitous encounter with emerging greatness. … The Curtis Institute of Music doesn’t cut a showy figure in its hometown. But on the world stage of classical music, its graduates have a presence far out of proportion with their little slip of a school, whose enrollment is a mere 165 students. … What’s striking about the school today is the extent to which, even amid great uncertainty in classical music, graduates are finding success both in traditional roles as orchestral players or soloists and, increasingly, in novel careers created with help from the school’s developing sense of entrepreneurialism. … ‘More and more you see artists not necessarily waiting for a Deutsche Grammophon contract to come their way,’ says Curtis president Roberto Díaz. ‘They self-produce recordings, they market them themselves. Some of them start their own recording companies, they do their own PR just through how they manage themselves over the Internet. And I think you see more and more that musicians—the really successful ones—tend to have careers that are not just one-dimensional.’ ” Read SymphonyNOW’s coverage of Curtis’s new home Lenfest Hall.
Posted December 5, 2011
