The career of the American musician David Curtis has been unusual in several respects. He has been active in the U.S., where he was born, and in the U.K., where he was mostly trained. He has been equally well known as a chamber musician and as a conductor, and his career has been divided between settled periods and activities as a freelancer. In addition to his performing career, Curtis has been active as a fundraising executive, manager, public speaker, and producer.

An American citizen, Curtis attended the Royal Academy of Music in London. There he co-founded the Coull Quartet, in which he played viola. That group made more than 30 albums, recording the complete string quartets of Mendelssohn and Schubert as well as works by a wide variety of mainstream 20th century composers including Frank Bridge, Edward Elgar, and Dmitry Shostakovich. The group was heard on the BBC 3 network some 250 times. In 1996 Curtis founded the Orchestra of the Swan, which has become one of Britain's top small orchestras, has recorded extensively on the Somm, Avie, and Signum Classics labels, and has toured Mexico, the U.S., Turkey, and China as well as appearing on BBC radio and television and on the ITV television network in Britain.

A champion of new music, Curtis has also evinced a strong commitment to bringing classical music into nontraditional venues: this culminated in a three-year Orchestra of the Swan residency at Birmingham (U.K.) International Airport, where the group performed in arrival and departure halls and at the airport fire station. Curtis has sponsored family concerts and participated in programs to train musicians with disabilities and to perform music and raise money for dementia sufferers. As part of the latter effort, he ran the London Marathon and raised more than £10,000. Curtis is the founder of the Spring Sounds festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and of its successor, Music of Our Time. He has also been a regular guest conductor at the Nordic Music Days festival in Iceland. He has taught at music schools in Britain, the U.S., and Australia, and has an impressive track record as a fundraiser. In 2018 he left the Orchestra of the Swan to focus on his own growing charitable cultural management firm, which began with a fax machine in Curtis' bedroom and grew into an enterprise with a cash turnover of more than £650,000 in 2016. ~ James Manheim, Rovi