Sidney Foster, Lucie Stern

A fellow student in the same year as Jorge Bolet (1927) was Sidney Foster (born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1917) who was aged 10, the youngest student Curtis ever took.  

(In 1968 Foster, a Professor at Indiana School of Music 1952-77, was to coax Bolet there from Spain as a teaching colleague.)   Imelda Delgado in a book on Foster relates a shocking event in which in 1929 the young Sidney was dismissed from Curtis for being a "bad boy", though it later turned out that individuals in the school's administration had been embezzling funds from his Miami sponsors and somehow shifted the blame in an incident of "contrived mendacity".  When Foster returned to Curtis, in 1934, he studied with Saperton until his graduation in 1938.

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Among the other students were Nadia Reisenberg, Shura Cherkassky and the now-forgotten Lucie Stern. Born in 1913, a year earlier than Bolet, Stern died in 1938.

In 1925, one year after Curtis's founding, Josef Hofmann had accepted 11-year-old Lucie Stern into his highly competitive piano studio. She was born in Riga, Latvia. Hofmann served as her examiner during the audition, and immediately accepted Stern as his pupil. In addition to piano, Stern’s other main area of study was composition under Rosario Scalero.

Stern’s classmates at Curtis, including Shura Cherkassky (Piano '35) and Jorge Bolet (Piano '34), remember her as a free spirit who found it difficult to cope with the rigid structure espoused by Curtis at the time. Her inability to thrive became so evident that Hofmann, in December 1927, took the unprecedented step of granting her permission to live in New York and commute to Philadelphia on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for her lessons at Curtis.

Unfortunately, despite an increasingly successful solo career outside Curtis (The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in 1926 that Stern 'possess[ed] a talent which is met with only once or twice in a musical generation') this accommodation of Hofmann's proved insufficient, and  Stern was dismissed from the institute after the 1929 spring semester.

From Curtis archives website

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The Houston Chronicle (2 October 1927) mention s that "Little Jack Gregory Abram [from Texas] has won the scholarship at the Curtis Institute which will ensure his musical education. Isn't that grand! David Saperton, Mrs Spofford, and several others examined him. Jack said that Mr Saperton walked all around and viewed him from all angles, but it did not disconcert him."   

Jacques Abram (August 6, 1915 – October 5, 1998), born Jack Gregory Abram an American classical pianist, was born in Lufkin, Texas.

Abram began improvising at age 3 and performing in public at age 6. As a youth he studied with Ima Hogg and Ruth Burr of Houston. At the urging of Ignace Jan Paderewski and Josef Hofmann, who had heard Abram in concert, his parents enrolled him in the Curtis Institute, where he studied with David Saperton. At age 13, Abram transferred to the Juilliard School, where he continued his studies with Ernest Hutcheson.  Abram debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall performing the MacDowell D minor concerto.

In 1948, Abram gave the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's piano concerto in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1949 he gave the work its New York premiere under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, and on January 25, 1956 he was soloist in the work's first recording, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Herbert Menges.