Daniel Curtis
Music director, conductor, educator
When it comes to conducting, Daniel Nesta Curtis spends almost as much time thinking about what he’s going to say to introduce the music as he does studying the score.
“My favorite compliment is when people tell me they appreciate me speaking before a performance,” he said.
You won’t find Curtis, 33, at the helm of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra or
Pittsburgh Opera.
Instead, he has built a career leading the city’s smaller ensembles, particularly those that specialize in new music — organizations such as NAT 28, the Kassia Ensemble, Kamraton, Resonance Works Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Philharmonic, Quantum Theatre and many others. Curtis has also taught conducting at the graduate level at Carnegie
Mellon University since 2012 and directs the school’s contemporary music ensemble.
“I have carte blanche in programming, and it’s hard to find that anywhere else,” he said.
The traditional path for a conductor is to win an audition to be an assistant at an orchestra and then move to a directing position at a small orchestra before working up to larger, better-known organizations.
Curtis says he’s “healthfully skeptical” of what major orchestras are doing, and while he didn’t plan on working with so many small ensembles, he loves every moment of his patchwork career.
Just one example of the types of productions he’s directing — in 2019, Curtis served as music director and narrator in a post-apocalyptic production titled “Her Holiness the Winter Dog,” in which some humans act as pets in a new religious world order.
“When things feel weird or like they might not work, that’s when I get really excited,” Curtis said. “It’s a bit strange, now that I think about it.”
A Key West, Fla., native and bassoonist by training, Curtis lives with his husband in Troy Hill.