Overtones: Spring 2017

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MEET THE FACULTY Top left: Ms. Javian with ArtistYear Fellow Alize Rozsnyai (third from right) and her students in the choral program at South Philadelphia High School Top right: The student presenters of Curtis family concerts are coached by Ms. Javian, who makes a point of attending with her own children. PHOTO: DAVID SWANSON Watching Ms. Javian navigate her packed day, it’s striking how little time is wasted, yet how rarely she or her collaborators seem rushed. She keeps everyone focused with minimal hands-on direction. School, where she is teaching Suzuki violin. When Shannon recently sent out a text that the school had received an anonymous donation of violins, Ms. Javian responded that the news had “made her day.” “She just really cares about every project she’s doing,” Shannon says. This natural rapport with students extends, not surprisingly, to the heart of the matter: music. During breaks in the recording session she chats with violist Michael Casimir about orchestral excerpts. As she hears bassist Braizahn Jones improvising on a Stevie Wonder riff, she beams: “You keep playing all my favorite songs!” After the session has wrapped, she enlists Michael and a few other students to put the room back together. Everyone gets one last laugh, however, when Ms. Javian can’t quite follow the recording engineer’s mystical cable-coiling technique. “You’ll get it one day,” Michael teases her. CODA After the recording session wraps, Ms. Javian offers to take me, a first-time visitor, on a quick tour of Curtis’s main building, where all her lessons and rehearsals took place when she was a student. It’s like watching someone give a tour of their childhood home. We visit Field Concert Hall, onetime home to orchestra rehearsals, where the bass section would perch on one balcony, percussion on the other. We head upstairs to the practice rooms, where she shows me her class photo and the former bass studio just down the hall. She recalls the drudgery of hauling the basses off the rehearsal room platform, down the hall, and up the winding 19th-century staircase to that room, day after day. As we head out I suggest that maybe this is why she’s so quick to pitch in when it comes to the nitty-gritty—“lugging stuff,” as Ms. Javian puts it. She raises her eyebrows as if to agree but opts for disarming self-deprecation instead. “But I can’t even coil up a stupid cable!” she laughs. It seems that even the most accomplished arts leaders can still learn a thing or two. Perhaps this is Mary Javian’s greatest lesson of all. Ian VanderMeulen is a freelance writer and musician whose work has appeared in Symphony and Musical America. He lives in New York, where he is pursuing his doctorate at New York University. PHOTO: DAVID SWANSON WHY CHOOSE CURTIS? —Mary Javian More Reasons at www.curtis.edu/WhyChooseCurtis “For so long, I felt like the answer to that question was simply: ‘Because it’s the best.’ And now I actually think it’s: ‘Because it’s the most nurturing environment in which an artist can grow, and explore what works for them.’ Because of the size, because of the student-teacher ratio, and because of the huge range of performance opportunities and projects that students can pursue, [including] community engagement, support for entrepreneurial ideas. And the faculty … I think they’re amazing. The culture here is extremely nurturing in a way that’s really unique.” 8 OVERTONES SPRING <strong>2017</strong>
MEET THE STUDENTS Anastasiia Sidorova as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro PHOTO: KARLI CADEL The Right Moment ANASTASIIA SIDOROVA SET HER SIGHTS ON THE STAGE AS A CHILD IN RUSSIA. HER DEBUT CAME AT CURTIS. BY DAVE ALLEN “Everything in my life seems to happen at the right time.” It wasn’t mere serendipity that brought Anastasiia Sidorova to Curtis, much less to the United States. She has applied such determination and unwavering commitment to the greatest challenges in her life and career—choosing to study music in a conservatory setting, and moving from her native Russia to pursue it—that each step, and each success, has had the feeling of inevitability. Then, when you consider that in her first-ever opera—a small role in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, with the Curtis Opera Theatre in 2014—she ended up singing in her native language, Anastasiia’s life, and her nascent career, begin to seem charmed indeed. That initial stage appearance, years in the making, has given way to a pursuit of opera on all fronts, many of which have come as a surprise to this young mezzo-soprano. A native of Saint Petersburg, Anastasiia first came to Curtis for Summerfest during the summer of 2013, and then entered Curtis in 2014 at age 19 as a student in the undergraduate voice program. Among the surprises: She’s been prompted to re-examine her vocal range. “I thought I was this dark alto-mezzo,” she says, and that sound captivated Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre and Hirsig Family Dean of Vocal Studies, during her audition. He heard potential for a different, higher fach in it as well. “For my role in La scala di seta, I said to him, ‘it’s too high! I can’t do it!’” she recalls. He was adamant, though, and Anastasiia persevered in her second role at Curtis. “He loves to stretch your possibilities,” she says of Mr. Eliasen, and thanks to his continued encouragement and guidance by her private teacher, adjunct voice faculty Julia Faulkner, she’s now regularly performing music in the high-mezzo range. Her emergence has come about gradually, with smaller roles at Curtis paving the way for a breakthrough as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro last spring. “At first, it was just a simple character to me—just young and cute,” she says. She dug deeper into Cherubino to find strong emotions, playing this headstrong teenage boy with ardent, big-hearted threedimensionality, and she now sees much of her operatic future coming in other “trouser roles.” Anastasiia Sidorova holds the Casiana Hilton Annual Fellowship. FORTHRIGHT APPROACH Music has always stirred strong feelings in Anastasiia, and while she admits her indifference to all non-musical subjects during her youth, early experiences of attending performances at the famed Mariinsky Theatre and of singing patriotic songs for national celebrations made indelible impressions on her. Before starting high school, she decided to enter Rimsky-Korsakov Musical College—she says she didn’t ask her parents for permission, OVERTONES SPRING <strong>2017</strong> 9
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Page 33 and 34: MEET THE ALUMNI Enterprising Ideas
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Page 37 and 38: NOTATIONS Glass’s Akhnaten with t
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Page 41 and 42: NOTATIONS STUDENTS In November, HÉ
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