Gig Magazine
1 October 2005
Life is good for Orchestra of the Swan and its conductor David Curtis

Swan, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, bills itself as ‘the chamber orchestra for the heart of England. The description is accurate in more senses than the geographic. For David Curtis’ Stratford-based ensemble has always sought to be at the heart of England’s musical life, playing to audiences throughout the region, championing a diverse repertoire, commissioning new work and pumping life into community music-making.

In 1995, the Stratford Festival found itself in need of an orchestra and turned to David Curtis – violist with the Coull Quartet – to create one. From the first the new ensemble was much more than a scratch band and rapidly established a reputation for precision, detail and virtuosity.

Fundamental to Curtis’ creed is that a conductor should focus equal attention on every part: ‘My background is in chamber music and that informs how I run an orchestra, coming from inside an ensemble you are very good at encouraging the second musicians in an orchestra, in a quartet all the parts are important – they have different roles, but you wouldn’t dream of saying the viola part is more important than the cello part or visa versa – and form all parts of the orchestra are important though they all have different roles’. Looked at from this perspective, the limited resources of a 30-piece chamber orchestra become a positive advantage, ‘in a small ensemble everyone has to be on the edge of their seats, playing for al they are worth; there’s no space for passengers’, Curtis insists.

For Curtis, it is just as important ‘to actively engage the audience – to make sure they are not just a cog in a machine but part of the performance’. He and the orchestra’s composer in association, Julian Philips, give talks before every concert and expect their audiences to enter new and unfamiliar sound worlds. The orchestra has just completed a twp-year project celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sir Michael Tippett’s birth. Music of our Time placed Tippett’s works side by side with pieces by living composers, masterpieces from Tippett’s contemporaries and music from the classical and romantic canon.