William Curry is smart enough to know that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission - and if you just go ahead and do something well enough, you may not have to apologize at all. When he first came to the N.C. Symphony as Summerfest artistic director 15 years ago, Curry had a plan he didn't bother filling management in on.
"When I came on board, it was nothing but pops, Broadway and Hollywood," Curry said. "I didn't tell management that we needed better balance by including more of the classics, because I knew they'd say no. I just started working in more of that in tiny, incremental segments. At first the audience was not accustomed to listening, they were noisy. But after a while, we found that classical did as well as Broadway at the box office. That pleased me."
In his own modest way, Curry has become the face of Summerfest and one of the symphony's most recognizable figures. And he goes about his work in a way that leaves no doubt that the music comes first, whether the program is classical or pop or some combination. Scott Freck, the symphony's general manager and vice president for artistic operations, calls Curry "a great ambassador for the symphony, and orchestral music at large."
"If there's a kind of music Bill has not conducted, I'd like to know it because his knowledge is encyclopedic," Freck said. "He brings a great sense of balance and fun to Summerfest, which he wants to be both inviting and musically satisfying. Literally hundreds of thousands of kids have had their first experience with classical music from hearing him leading the orchestra."
Curry will be on the podium Saturday for one of this season's more pop-oriented Summerfest programs - "Pirates!" - featuring music from "The Pirates of Penzance," "Pirates of the Carribean" and more. A week later, he'll conduct the season finale featuring the "classically trained garage band" Time for Three with a program that includes jazz, blues, country and bluegrass.
As part of the balance Curry tries to strike, Summerfest 2011 also offered Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," one of the most iconic works in the classical canon.
"I was very lucky to get to work with Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops as my mentor in the mid-'70s," Curry said. "He always quoted Duke Ellington: 'If it sounds good, it is good.' He didn't categorize music or differentiate between a Strauss waltz or 'light' music. Just pick the best, do things that will sound good outdoors and audiences will love it."
A varied career
Curry has conducted more than 40 orchestras in locales as far away as Taiwan, Bangkok and Israel. Along with overseeing Summerfest, he is music director for the Durham Symphony Orchestra. And he's a composer, too, most notably of the Martin Luther King-themed "Eulogy for a Dream." The Indianapolis Symphony premiered "Eulogy" in 2002, with narration by the late William Warfield (of "Porgy and Bess" fame).
That meant a lot to Curry, who was smitten the first time he heard Warfield perform - on television at King's funeral in 1968. Curry was 14 years old and growing up in Pittsburgh, and Warfield would come to be a role model for Curry as a young African-American with classical-music aspirations.
Color in a pale world
Curry is the only African-American who performs regularly with the N.C. Symphony. His brother Ralph has played cello for 30 years with the Cleveland Orchestra, where he is one of only two African-American musicians.
"We're the only black siblings we know of in the orchestral world," Curry said. "We came from a lower-middle-class home with no music, so that was not fertile soil. But why was that not duplicated? I don't know. I was born in 1954, the year of Brown vs. Board of Education. At 15, I could rattle off the names of eight great black operatic sopranos. Now there's not one. I must have caught the tail end of something. Maybe black kids after me were told, 'That's not for us, it's not your culture.' I'd like to take a sabbatical and do some research, try to turn that around."
Response to prejudice
Some years ago, Curry applied for the job of music director for an orchestra he won't identify beyond saying it was based in a Southern capital city. But the interview went great, and the orchestra's executive director told Curry he was the front-runner.
Next thing he heard, the executive director resigned because the board would not go along with hiring Curry - allegedly over concerns that having a black music director would hurt fundraising.
"Things like that have happened other places, too, but that was the most dramatic," Curry said. "My manager told me, 'You got a lawsuit here. But if you do that, you'll be known as a troublemaker.' It's a small industry. I don't talk about this much because it makes people uncomfortable.
"So my response," Curry concluded, "is I'm gonna just do the best work I can because I love music."
That he does, with a daily regimen that includes listening to at least one piece of music he's never heard before. Not all professional musicians still have that love, believe it or not. Between preparation and rehearsal and travel, the classical musician's lot can be a grind, and maintaining the right level of enthusiasm and engagement can be a challenge.
"Bill's a very smart man," said David Friedlander, the symphony's violinist and associate concertmaster. "He knows everything there is to know about composers, and he finds interesting works that aren't being performed a lot, brings new light to them. I find that admirable. He has a lot of energy and excitement and passion about music and he really loves it."
Turning down Atlanta
For his part, Curry feels the same way about his musicians. In 1996, he also had an offer from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. But he chose to come to the N.C. Symphony instead.
"There was no question which one I'd go with, even though Atlanta has a multi-zillion-dollar budget and a lot of Grammy Awards," Curry said. "There's incredible chemistry here, which you can't fake or buy. It's hard to believe, but some orchestras don't like music or the playing or the fun of performing. Burnout, jaded, whatever. This one is the opposite. They've always been hungry to be lifted from gig to magic. I've conducted 40 orchestras, and ... I understand more than most how the love of music gets rubbed off, and they've still retained it."
Not a show-biz type
Curry once aspired to be one of those high-profile "superstar conductors" at a major orchestra, like Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But that requires a level of show-business flamboyance that makes Curry uneasy.
"Dudamel is a very gifted musician, but he's also incredibly choreographed and exhibitionistic on the podium," Curry said. "People go looking for him to do that now, and he's in a trap now where he's conducting the audience more than the musicians. Are people listening? It seems like they're watching him express the emotions of the music.
"I'm not complaining, the toothpaste is out of the tube," he added. "It's a visual age and if you want to get hired, you have to do that. But I don't yearn to be anything more than a first-class conductor."
