The cellist, who lives alone in a Mount Vernon apartment, grew up in Park Heights Terrace, one of five children. His parents were not musicians, but music lovers.
Sitting in their Randallstown home, filled with a vivid variety of carefully displayed collectibles, the Stuarts reminisced recently about Troy's musical development. "Troy knew early on that music was it," said his mother, Loy, a self-described homemaker.
First came Suzuki classes (a group-teaching technique) in elementary school. "Troy started on violin and then decided it was too heavy and too big," Henry Stuart, a retired chemist, said, smiling. "So he graduated to something heavier and bigger. Troy actually slept with his cello sometimes."
His mother adds: "I didn't have to push. I knew he would take things as far as he could. Initially, with all the practicing, you don't hear the talent. When he played in public, it was a shock. I was so impressed. He still impresses me. Even if I weren't his mother, I'd be a fan."
'They come for the music'
In the Times-Union Center's concert hall, about 200 people have gathered for the program, which includes works by Mozart and the late African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Performances were initially held in Jacksonville's restored 1929 Ritz Theater, from which the ensemble drew its name, in a neighborhood once dubbed the "Harlem of the South."
Roughly 40 percent of the listeners on this night are black. "There will be some African-Americans who come to see a black group only because it's a black group," Stuart says, "just as I'm sure there will be others who won't come because African-Americans are onstage. I think that people who come to the Ritz initially because we're African-American are less impressed by that when they come back. They come back for the music. It's infectious."
The concert, which finds all of the Ritz players in supple, expressive form, receives a standing ovation. The audience then trickles into a reception room to meet and greet the musicians. Lots of hugs and flashing camera phones. Stuart and his colleagues are quickly surrounded by animated well-wishers.
A young black girl, tightly holding her mother's hand, looks up at clarinetist Patterson with a shy smile and wide eyes that follow his every move across the floor, as if seeing some kind of hero.
'What you believe in'
