Charles Curtis
www.gardenvariety.org
Cellist Charles Curtis performs a unique repertoire of major solo works created expressly for him by La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue and Alison Knowles, rarely-heard compositions by Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield, and works by Cardew, Wolff, Feldman and Cage. La Monte Young's four-hour Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord... is the only solo work composed by Young for a performer other than himself. Radigue created the Naldjorlak cycle, her first compositions for acoustic instruments, initially as a solo cello work for Curtis. Lucier's compositions for Curtis include music for cello and piano, cello and sine waves, and solo cello with large orchestra.
A former faculty member at Princeton University, and for eleven years the first solo cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, Curtis is professor for contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, and tours and records internationally. His performances over the last year have taken him to the Angelica Festival in Bologna, the Guggenheim in New York, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin, Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, the Regenbogenstadl in Polling, Bavaria, as well as Chicago, Austin, Hamburg and Los Angeles.
Curtis created original music for the Jeff Perkins film The Painter Sam Francis, screened at festivals and museums worldwide. He continues to perform and record the traditional repertoire for cello, both as soloist and as artistic director of the chamber music project Camera Lucida.