March 28, 2024
By Stephi Wild
On Thursday, April 18, 2024 and Saturday, April 20, 2024 at 7:30pm in Herberger Theater, the Phoenix Symphony will present composer and violinist Curtis Stewart in the 3rd annual REVERB: Contemporary Music Festival.
Stewart curates and performs a varied and engaging program that includes an expanded concept of his GRAMMY-nominated project, of Love. and the world premiere of his Afrofuturist meditation on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Seasons of Change for solo violin, orchestra, electronics and video.
Conducted by Tito Muñoz, Seasons of Change frames both evenings with an acoustic/electronic musical dreamscape on climate change, class and the nature of digital memory. These 4 new works are paired alongside works from of Love., as well as symphonic works by inti figgis vizueta and Leyou Wang, winners of American Composers Orchestra’s National call for scores: Earshot.
REVERB: Contemporary Music Festival is an exploration and celebration of works from the current musical landscape through intimate concerts, panel discussions and behind-the-scenes events to explore the repertoire and learn more about the living composer. As part of Stewart’s curation, the program will also feature the voices of the unhoused community in Phoenix, recorded conversations with Circle the City clients weave in and out of the program, centering their stories as a new and personal motivation for art to advocate for climate change. The primary question driving this evening is “Who will climate change erase first?”
Tackling the topic of climate change as an issue that affects every community very differently, Stewart shares in his program notes, “The purpose of this work is to document the effects of climate change on those who are unhoused as well as those greatly affected by that environmental change with very little institutional support. I aim to trigger segments of these recorded anonymous conversations in performance of a recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, tapping into the cultural relevance of that historic “classical” work on orchestral concert stages and directing conversations in those spaces toward the support of organizations that interact with the unhoused population, especially as they adapt to environmental issues in their day to day lives. I plan on creating different audio interviews triggered in the various communities where the work is performed to address the issues and needs of that specific community on our orchestral stages. My hope is the ethos and pathos of these conversations will drive support of those sitting in symphonic audiences toward those individuals and institutions already doing the effective work to combat the effects of climate change.”
Stewart has toured solo selections from Seasons of Change to Death of Classical’s The Crypt Sessions in Brooklyn, and to venues in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Vancouver, Canada. In the 2024-2025 season, the program appears in NYC and Seattle, among others.
