A look inside the Curtis Institute’s $15 million renovation

When COVID-19 hit and live performance fell silent, so did the sound of practicing pianists and trombonists billowing from the windows of the Curtis Institute of Music onto the streets around Rittenhouse Square.

Not long into the pandemic, though, silence gave way to something more percussive: construction. While students sat at home taking lessons online, the three historic buildings that form Curtis’ ancestral home underwent a startling renovation.

Walk up the new front bluestone steps of the elite, tuition-free conservatory today and all looks familiar — and not. Gone from the Common Room are two bulky reception desks, as well as a tall, glass, fire partition that broke up the space. Stylistically incongruous window-unit air-conditioning has been removed. The elaborate, white-oak-paneled space has been largely restored to the way it looked when it was a private mansion — grand, open, and spare.

If the public perceives the spaciousness as an invitation, that’s just the signal school leaders were aiming to send.

“It is a change philosophically for the school. There’s no question that we want to be a more open and accessible place,” said Larry Bomback, Curtis administration senior vice president. “That was one of the big reasons for doing this project in the first place, was to make it more accessible, to have more people come into the doors.”

Curtis’ interior is one of those eye-popping Philadelphia surprises, and more so now. Mantelpieces have been cleaned and restored, elaborate woodwork fabricated to match the old, and a new architecturally appropriate chandelier for the ornate Bok Room is on the way.

The changes at Curtis, overseen by architecture firm IEI Group in Northern Liberties, are neither merely cosmetic nor modest. The project came with a $15 million price tag (only half of which has been raised so far) and included replacing practice-room window units with modern heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning; installation of a new heavy-duty elevator capable of hoisting grand pianos; the addition of a larger costume and wig shop; and some sprucing up of Field Concert Hall, where most public concerts take place.

Carved out of what was previously the roof, the fourth floor’s mini black-box space, called the Media and Innovation Lab, is a techy answer to the larger existing black-box opera theater. There’s also a new network of back-of-house corridors that allow better access throughout.

Curtis had planned on launching renovations over three to five summers. Then the pandemic struck and buildings were emptied, and the school’s trustees approved a version of the renovation that was completed in less than 18 months.

Curtis may be trumpeting a new openness, though it isn’t simply throwing open its doors without limits. In fact, a new system of electronic door passes now gives the school control over who goes where and when.

Nor are visitors being invited to show up at any time to eavesdrop on practice rooms for an endless stream of Liszt, Mahler, and Brahms. But students are now physically back at school, public recitals have startedagain, and concertgoers can wander some hallways to see artifacts from the school’s history as one of the world’s top producers of piano soloists, opera singers, and orchestral players.

These renovations can be seen as a continuation of a cracking open of the Curtis cloister that began several decades ago when more concerts were extended to the public. Calls have intensified in recent years for classical music to shatter its perceived elitism and to bring the public into the process. The new Media and Innovation Lab, seen by Curtis as a place to marry art and technology, is promising. Its maiden voyage comes in April when visitors can experience the school’s Scheherazade Project, an immersive merging of Rimsky’s music with floor-to-ceiling images. Topics to be explored in coming years include artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and gaming.

Renovations were long planned as a follow-up to Curtis’s major expansion a block eastward in 2011 into a new, 105,000-square-foot Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates-designed building, which houses dorms, a cafeteria, an orchestra rehearsal hall, and studios. Elegant and efficient as those spaces are, they have the look and feel of many new high-end college buildings.

Updating the historic structures at 18th and Locust Streets required something different. Perhaps no other music conservatory in the United States prizes its musical roots as Curtis does, and so even as the school has said goodbye to some traditions — the intensive orchestral-lab program run by the late Otto-Werner Mueller, invaluable to both young conductors as well as instrumentalists comes to mind — it is eager to project legacy as strength and, if you will, brand.

Legacy means ceremony. Curtis will continue to pour tea every Wednesday in the Common Room for students, faculty, and staff from a samovar brought over from Russia by one-time director Efrem Zimbalist.

For visitors, there’s no question that the semipublic spaces are steeped in the past. A museum-like aura has been retained in the director’s office, where a Norman Rockwell portrait of Curtis founder Mary Louise Curtis Bok looks on. The school’s original charter, carrying signatures of Bok and Curtis family members, now displays over the grand Bok Room mantel.

Many spaces have been meticulously restored. But the new back-of-house corridors that connect the three historic buildings are cold, white, and featureless, like airport or hospital passages. The doors in some of the historic spaces — the one to the director’s office, to some practice rooms — also seem starkly at odds with the old-Philadelphia elegance.

The names of teaching studios memorializing vaunted pedagogical stars like oboist Marcel Tabuteau and harpist Carlos Salzedo have been kept, though perhaps not forever. A school spokesperson said, “We have been looking into whether named spaces should retain their names. Those conversations are still in process.”

A strong link to history has been achieved with this renovation, but Curtis, which marks in centenary in 2024, can’t count on its past to remain competitive. Other music conservatories also have long legacies and are working toward being tuition-free, as Curtis is. The school was recently forced to reckon with its own past, a history that includes claims of sexual and emotional abuse of students, as documented by The Inquirer and a subsequent report by the law firm Cozen O’Connor.

It isn’t clear to me whether the golden age of classical music in America (essentially the 20th century) has quite the allure to students it once had. Social justice, entrepreneurialism, technology skills, and the question of whether such a degree will bring a job seem more salient. The past just isn’t what it used to be.

The opening of Lenfest Hall more than a decade ago blew some dust off the institution, and this renovation at least makes available the space to imagine what the future can be for classical music. But it’s what happens within the walls of the school — its ability to offer a new set of real-life skills while not cutting into the famously high level of hyper-specialized training — that will determine whether Curtis remains on top.

The Curtis Institute’s “Scheherazade” Project, April 29-May 1, is being presented free, though reservations are required at tickets@curtis.edu or 215-893-7902. Student recitals are free but require reservations, curtis.edu.