I had the honor of speaking today at the commencement exercises for the Curtis Institute of Music. The graduating class was small — Curtis has a famously low acceptance rate of four percent — but I saw one familiar face in the varied throng: the gifted violinist Benjamin Beilman, whom I heard at Marlboro in 2008. Congratulations to him and to all the others. (One graduate, Nikki Chooi, was unable to attend because he is competing in the Queen Elisabeth Competition, and just made the finals.) Otto-Werner Mueller, a formidable guru of the art of conducting, was the focus of many tributes at the ceremony. The Curtis Symphony is flying tonight to Germany, with several appearances scheduled at the Dresdner Musikfestspiele next week. Last winter, Peter Dobrin, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a three-part series about the storied past and present-day evolution of this venerable institution, with various online features attached.
