SALON 58 PRESENTS: Visions of America  - An Intimate Evening with Min Kwon (piano) & Curtis Stewart (violin)

Join us for a rare, intimate salon evening with world-renowned visionaries Min Kwon and Curtis Stewart as they radically reimagine the American musical landscape for the nation's 250th anniversary. From the close quarters of a house concert, you will have a front-row seat to a genre-defying dialogue that brilliantly erases the boundaries between classical tradition and modern cultural identity.

Curtis Stewart released this year "24 American Caprices" - a radical reimagination of the 24 Caprices for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini. Stewart takes the "caprice" - a form famous for unapologetic technical wizardry by European composers like Paganini and Wieniawski - and injects it with modern American DNA. He abstracts tiny fragments of iconic tracks from artists like Dolly Parton, Kendrick Lamar, Bob Dylan, and Stevie Wonder, mutating them into staggering acoustic violin pieces. By treating a David Bowie drumbeat or an Aretha Franklin groove with the same intense, rigorous reverence traditionally reserved for Bach, he erases the tired boundaries between "high art" and popular culture. The album is a playful but profound look at American identity. It makes a joyful assertion that pop, jazz, and R&B deserve the exact same reverence and rigorous virtuosity as traditional classical music.

Min Kwon’s America/Beautiful is a monumental musical tapestry of the United States - showing the greatest strength isn't uniformity, but the messy, glorious reality of e pluribus unum - out of many, one. She commissioned 70 vastly different composers to create 70 solo piano variations on the classic 1882 anthem "America the Beautiful" and breathed life into their visions through her own breathtaking playing. The project was released in May 2026 for the 250th anniversary.  

Don't miss your chance to add this to the list of your unique live music experiences - grab your tickets now!

PROGRAM

• selections from America/Beautiful
• selections from 24 American Caprices
• piano and violin improvisations

EVENING SCHEDULE

• Doors open with welcome drinks & snacks: 7:30pm
• Music starts: 8:00pm
• Post-concert mingle: 9:00 - 10:00pm

MIN KWON, piano

Korean-born American pianist Min Kwon excels in a versatile career that encompasses concerti, solo recitals, and chamber music appearances, while in high demand around the world as pedagogue, arts advocate, and administrator. She has held professional engagements in over 60 countries on seven continents and all 50 U.S. states.

Professor of Piano at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2002, Dr. Kwon is also the founder and director of the Center for Musical Excellence (CME), a non-profit dedicated to mentoring and supporting gifted young musicians. To date, CME has awarded 12 international performing arts grants, each up to $10,000, and currently features 20 young artists on the 2019 CME Young Artists Roster. CME’s alumni/ae list includes more than 100 young artists from 22 countries. As Artistic Director of Music Made Here, a concert series inaugurated in 2018, and CME in Harding Homes, Kwon brings world class talent to intimate venues. She has also served as Co-Director of Vienna ConcertoFest, a two-week festival that provides extraordinary opportunities for young artists to appear as soloists with the Viennese International Orchestra in prestigious venues in Austria.

As soloist, Min Kwon has performed extensively in Europe, North and South America, and Asia, with such orchestras as Philadelphia, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Fort Worth, Aspen Festival Orchestra, Orquesta Estaudo Mexico, Orquesta Sinfónica Venezuela, Wiener Residenz Orchester, Bacau Philharmonic, as well as all major orchestras in Korea on several nationally televised concerts. Since her Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center debut in 1992 with the Juilliard Orchestra, she has appeared with many of New York’s leading ensembles, including New York Classical Players, Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, and the New York Sinfonietta. Among the distinguished conductors with whom she has collaborated are James Conlon, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Alan Gilbert, Vaktang Jordania, Gerhardt Zimmerman, and Xian Zhang.

As recitalist, Kwon has performed at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, where she returns each year as Artistic Director of critically acclaimed, themed concerts featuring Rutgers pianists. Additionally, she has appeared in such major cities as Boston, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney. The New York Concert Review wrote of her Weill Recital: an “impassioned performance, in full technical command, she allowed for both simplicity and opulence, and the results were gratifying…Ms Kwon made the trek with enviable ease and calm but gave plenty of horror-film drama amid booms of sonic thunder and pianistic lightning.”

https://www.pianistminkwon.com/

CURTIS STUWART, violin

Praised for “combining omnivory and brilliance” (The New York Times), seven-time GRAMMY® Award-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart translates stories of American self-determination to the concert stage. Tearing down the facade of “classical violinist,” Stewart is in constant pursuit of his musical authenticity, treating art as a battery for realizing citizenship. As a solo violinist, composer, Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, professor at The Juilliard School, and member of award-winning ensembles PUBLIQuartet and The Mighty Third Rail, he realizes a vision to find personal and powerful connections between styles, cultures, and musics. He was awarded a 2025 Sphinx Medal of Excellence in recognition of extraordinary leaders in the classical music field who are transforming lives while addressing systemic obstacles within Black and Latino communities.

Stewart's 2025-2026 season includes his first public performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade with the National Philharmonic Orchestra; the world premiere of his I wouldn't stop there: in the words of a KING by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra; the commissioning of new American Caprices by American Public Media and Juilliard Pre-College; a performance of GRAMMY®-Nominated Of Love., presented by Seattle Symphony’s Octave 9 series; Seasons of Change with Sybarite5 in New York City; appointments as the Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s 2025-2026 Joyce C. Willis Artist in Residence and Composer-in-Residence at URI Guitar Festival; and more.

In the summer of 2025, Stewart released a solo album, Seasons of Change – Stewart’s own recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which incorporates audio interviews from unhoused individuals and serves as the frame for an Afrofuturist meditation on climate change, class, and the nature of digital memory, on Bright Shiny Things. Stewart is featured soloist on an album of world premiere orchestral recordings by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, performed by the National Philharmonic under Michael Repper and released in August 2025 on AVIE Records. For his performance of his own arrangement of suites from Coleridge-Taylor’s 24 Negro Melodies, Stewart has been nominated for a 2026 GRAMMY® Award for Best Instrumental Solo. His works Drill and Double Down were also featured on Sphinx Virtuosi’s summer 2025 album, American Mirror, out with Deutsche Grammophon.

In his 2024-2025 season, Stewart’s performances included appearances at the Music in the Morning series in Vancouver; at his program, The American Recital, at Princeton University alongside masterclasses with students; in Bernstein's Serenade with the Maryland Symphony Orchestra; and with Mak Grgic at the St. Louis Classical Guitar concert season. He also held residencies at Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Cleveland Institute of Music, and served as Resident Artist at Kaufman Music Center, during which he performed in the world premieres of his own American Caprices and Seasons of Change with the Gateways Festival Orchestra at Eastman School of Music and The Kaufman Center’s Merkin Hall.

Among many others, Stewart’s compositions have recently been featured by the Sphinx Virtuosi, which performed his Drill on a nationwide tour with Stewart as the group’s Composer-in-Residence; the American Composers Orchestra, which commissioned his Embrace as part of New Virtuoso: Borders and premiered it at Carnegie Hall; and by violin and cello duo Catherine Cho and Amy Sue Barston in a new work commissioned by Juilliard Prep. Stewart has also been commissioned to compose new solo, chamber, and orchestral works by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall’s Play/USA, Seattle Symphony, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, the New York Festival of Song, Newport Classical Festival, the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Eastman Cello Institute, Orlando Philharmonic, The Knights, La Jolla Music Society, Sybarite5, members of the New York Philharmonic, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and more. He composed The Famous People, five recompositions of Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances, for a premiere by violinist Gil Shaham with the Virginia Symphony in March 2023, followed by a performance by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2024.

As a soloist, Curtis Stewart has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cal Performances, Washington Performing Arts, Virginia Arts Festival, The Juilliard School, and the 2022 GRAMMY® Awards, among many others. He has made special appearances with Los Angeles Opera and singer-songwriter Tamar Kali; as curator and guest soloist with Anthony Roth Costanzo and the New York Philharmonic “Bandwagon,” touring performance installations from NYC’s Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art; to MTV specials with Wyclef Jean; and sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden with Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and Seal.

The world premiere recording of Julia Perry’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra with the Experiential Orchestra on Bright Shiny Things was nominated for a 2025 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Both Stewart’s 2021 album of quarantined song cycles and art videos, Of Power (Bright Shiny Things), and his 2023 album, of Love. – a tribute to his late mother Elektra Kurtis-Stewart – were nominated for GRAMMY® Awards for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

Curtis Stewart is a member of award-winning ensembles, PUBLIQuartet (Chamber Music America Visionary award, winner Concert Artist Guild, 2023 GRAMMY® Award Nomination) and The Mighty Third Rail (Best Music, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Comic Book Theater Festival). PUBLIQuartet’s album What Is American (Bright Shiny Things) was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award. He has held chamber music residencies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, and made return appearances at the Newport, Detroit, Vision, and NYC Winter Jazz Festivals. Curtis Stewart has worked with many of today's forward-thinking musicians, including Henry Threadgill, SilkRoad Ensemble, Jessie Montgomery, Alicia Hall-Moran and Jason Moran, Mark O’Connor, Julia Bullock, members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Billy Childs, Alarm Will Sound, Linda Oh, JACK Quartet, members of Snarky Puppy, Don Byron, Matt Wilson, among many others.

An enthusiastic educator, Curtis Stewart teaches “Performance Practice of the Blues” and “Improvised Chamber Music” as well as regularly coaching Chamber Music at The Juilliard School; directs the Contemporary Chamber Music program at the Perlman Music Program; served on the board of Concert Artist Guild; conducted several orchestras and opera pit orchestras; and for ten years led all levels of music theory and string orchestra at the LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City. In 2022, he was named Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, a national organization dedicated to the creation, celebration, performance, and promotion of orchestral music by diverse and innovative American composers.

Stewart was born into a musical family – his father is avant-garde jazz tuba pioneer Bob Stewart and mother Elektra Kurtis, a soulful Greek jazz violinist – who formed the framework of his sound world through daring improvisation, rigorous Western classical training, and conceptual composition. 

Learn more at www.curtisjstewart.com.