Solo concert by the great Charles Curtis, in a program designed around the musical concept of glissando, or slow, continuous movement from one pitch to another.

Here, he performs Alvin Lucier’s Glacier for Solo Cello (2009) and Slices for Cello and Pre-recorded Orchestra (2007-2011), Valence (2016) by Tashi Wada, and Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008) by Alison Knowles.

Cellist Charles Curtis (b.1960, Laguna Beach, Calif.) has created a new body of work for solo cello through his collaborations with composers La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff and Tashi Wada, artists Alison Knowles and Mieko Shiomi, and filmmakers Raha Raissnia, Luke Fowler and Jeff Perkins. Rarely-heard works of Terry Jennings, Morton Feldman and Richard Maxfield have also been signposts in Curtis’s interpretive life. In the 1980s Curtis participated in weirdo rock bands such as King Missile, Dogbowl and Bongwater and he performed with the noise formation Borbetomagus. Trained at Juilliard with Leonard Rose and Harvey Shapiro, Curtis received the Piatigorsky Prize of the New York Cello Society. For ten years Curtis was Principal Cellist of the Symphony Orchestra of the NDR in Hamburg; a former faculty member at Princeton and Brooklyn College, since 2000 Curtis has been professor of music at the University of California, San Diego.

Presented in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; organized in cooperation with the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts