Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

At the 2022 Grammy Awards Ceremony, Curtis Stewart strode out in front of 12,000 industry VIPs with only his violin and some loose ideas for how to structure an improvisation on “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder. “It was the most exposed, high-profile solo performance I’d given,” Stewart recalled in an interview, “but I actually felt that there was this kind of peace inside that I hadn’t ever really felt before when performing. That moment made me understand that reaching in and looking for a peaceful sense of belonging is really what I’m yearning for.”

That song had appeared as the closing track on his solo album of violin, electronics and spoken word, Of Power, which earned him his first Grammy nomination in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Four years and three more nominations in that same category later, Stewart has released 24 American Caprices, an album of violin fantasies on popular songs filled with personal meaning for him (including “Isn’t She Lovely”), accompanied by published scores that capture every precise detail of his virtuosic technique. This program weaves together selections of those Caprices with original works he created for Of Love, another album of violin and poetry that he released in 2023, which also featured solo renditions of songs that were precursors to his Caprices.

This progression of projects that have lifted Stewart to the center of the classical music world was born out of personal tragedy and grief. In 2017, Stewart’s mother, Elektra Kurtis Stewart, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and the 31-year-old Stewart took on the role of caregiver. During the pandemic lockdown, he lived with her in his childhood apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and their living room became the makeshift studio where, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Stewart recorded Of Power, which he described as a “coming-of-agency story… through the lens of a Black man searching for authenticity in classical music.” After his mother died in 2021, Stewart created Of Love in her memory.

As the son of two professional musicians, it makes sense that Stewart processes his memories, feelings, and questions of identity and belonging through music. It is also second nature for him to explore and experiment outside of the boundaries that fence in most musicians. His father is Bob Stewart, a pioneering jazz tuba player from a family that left the South and the land of their ancestors’ enslavement during the Great Migration. Elektra Kurtis brought her own layers of migration, coming from a Greek family that had settled in Poland. They met when she was a conservatory student in Finland, which is where Stewart was born before the family moved to New York.

Stewart began playing his mother’s instrument, the violin, at three. He took Suzuki lessons, and would sit backstage during her orchestra rehearsals, hearing pieces like Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and then at night he would go to the gigs in clubs where she played traditional Greek music and directed the “world jazz collective” Ensemble Elektra. Other nights, Stewart would watch his father play with avant-garde jazz heavyweights like Lester Bowie, who had developed, as Stewart describes it, “a whole language of very experimental squeaks and squawks to make the trumpet speak like a person,” which he put to use in his idiosyncratic arrangements of pop songs for brass ensemble.

The curiosity and fearlessness that Stewart inherited from both of his parents set him on a path that is in stark contrast to the increasingly homogenized and controlled approach to classical violin that has become predominant in this era of perfectionistic digital recording. But taking a wider view, he is actually right in line with the spirit of the violin innovators of the 19th century, including Niccolò Paganini, the Italian firebrand who radically transformed what was considered possible on the instrument when he published his 24 Caprices in 1820. Stewart’s choice of the same title honors the inspiration he draws from Paganini, and it embraces his place within a mainstream tradition of classical music that hasn’t always embraced him back.

Paganini set a standard that equates the caprice with virtuosity, but for Stewart, the point is not “virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, but virtuosity for experimentation’s sake.” That genre of free elaboration on basic material began in Italy as the capriccio, which literally means “whim,” and it has always been a vehicle for musicians to put their own personal stamp on material.

The virtuosity that Stewart brings to these reimagined songs is self-evident, but anyone showing up expecting just to be dazzled by one of this century’s most innovative violinists may not be prepared for the vulnerability and open-heartedness that drives, for instance, the restless arpeggios derived from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or the wailing slides in his take on “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, a fluid approach to pitch shared by both the soulful Rembetika tradition of Greece and the American blues. These Caprices are notated with painstaking exactitude in the idiom of classical music, with the intention that they could be played by anyone. (And in fact, on the recent album release, Stewart handed over some of the tracks to other violinists, including his students.) But everything about which songs were included and which particular details within them sparked these flights of fancy — sometimes a clear melodic hook, other times something as abstract as a moment in the drum groove — come from Stewart’s deep relationship to the music and what it represents. “It’s the music that I heard in my household,” Stewart explains, “that on some level, I’ve known before I knew it. This is what has been passed down to me.”

In crafting these Caprices in a mode he describes as “serious fun,” Stewart pays tribute to the American music in his heart, the European techniques in his fingers, and the legacies of both sides of his family who developed their own ways, on opposite sides of the world, to process trauma through vibrant, virtuosic music. “What is the difference between grief and tradition?” Stewart asks. “Those two things are actually the same on some deep level. Honoring a tradition and celebrating that tradition is grieving. These caprices honor a certain tradition of playing that my mom inspired, that my dad inspires, and that America has inspired. It’s a way of saying, ‘Feel grateful for what you have because you know it could be gone.’”

Or to put it another way, as Stewart says, “We want to be free. It’s really hard to be free when you don’t know who you are.”

© 2026 Aaron Grad