concert review: Joshua Roman

[calimac]

This was one of those concerts so strikingly unusual that I couldn't not attend.

Joshua Roman is a professional cellist whose career was derailed when he developed Long Covid in 2021. It hit him like a truck, with symptoms rather resembling chronic fatigue. Having played the cello every day for most of his life, he put it away and didn't touch it for months.

When he was finally able to get it out and start playing again, the first piece he played was the Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 1, pretty much the foundation stone of the cello repertoire. After so long away, the sheer joy of the physicality of playing and the nourishment he got from making music and from its sound struck him forcefully. It touched him inside, is the way he put it.

Music is for healing and nourishing the body, the emotions, the mind. It's a tool kit for wellness. That is the lesson Roman learned. Though he's never fully recovered, and will - he says - not be the same man again, he has been going around giving concerts illustrating this lesson, and this at Stanford was one of them.

In between talking about his experiences and what music means to him, he played a few unaccompanied pieces: the Bach Prelude, the medieval-inspired in manus tuas by Caroline Shaw, a Capriccio by Krzysztof Penderecki to allow for the need for chaos and craziness in life, and a couple pieces of his own. One of these, written during the original pandemic, was a duet written to express the need for playing together with others, with separate melodies for each of two cellos which interweave and layer on top of each other. He played this with Melanie Ambler, a Stanford medical student who plays healing solo cello concerts for critically ill patients and those in pallative care.

Then, for his favorite concerto, the Saint-Saëns First, Roman was joined by the Stanford Medicine Orchestra, conducted by Terrance Yan. The Medicine Orchestra? Yes, it's a project to bring artistic creativity into the busy lives of personnel at the Stanford Hospital and Medical School. And it shouldn't be surprising that many of those people play instruments, considering how many of the performers at Stanford undergraduate student concerts are revealed by their bios to be pre-meds.

Roman expressed his gratitude to be playing with "an orchestra of healers," and for an encore he offered another one of his solo pieces: he sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" - the original verses, which hardly anyone does in full - while accompanying himself with an imaginative cello line.

Roman's cello tone is rich and slightly nasal, but very light in ambiance. It soars rather than weighs down. As a session for healing the soul in a difficult time, this concert was - as the cliche puts it - what the doctor ordered.

But considering why we were here and what happened to Joshua Roman, why were less than 5% of the attendees wearing masks? What is wrong with people?

Comments

[sartorias]

Sounds like a nifty concert--in spite of the non-mask-wearing

[wild_patience]

I'm a little confused by what you mean about Cohen's original lyrics and that people rarely do them. Cohen himself often sang different lyrics in different performances. The only non-Cohen lyrics I've heard are that bastardized ones making it a Christmas song, which I've only seen on YouTube.

[calimac]

Cohen's original lyrics = the ones he originally sang, before he started changing them. "original" means "first," not "genuine."

[kate_schaefer]

We had Joshua Roman as our principal cello1139 here in Seattle near the start of his career. He was fabulous, and I was sad when he moved on. Our current principal cello, Efe Baltacigil, is every bit as fabulous in a different way, and then there's the associate principal cello, Nathan Chan, who has energy and exuberance to burn. None of these words conveys anything about their musicianship. What am I trying to say about the cello section of the Seattle Symphony? There was nothing wrong with it before, but it wasn't the heart of what I listened to, ten or fifteen years ago, and now it is, and that change began with Joshua Roman's youthful energy.

Last week, Jerry, Suzle, Glenn, and I heard the Brahms sextets. I'm fond of watching the way chamber musicians communicate with each other, with nods and shoulder shrugs. All six musicians were fine, fine, fine, but Nathan Chan was especially fine in the first sextet, and his eyebrows could be a conductor all by themselves.

I didn't know the sextets before; I'm not a Brahms enthusiast. Well, except for the Hungarian dances as piano duets, and the alto rhapsody, and the German requiem, and now these sextets...and now I have to conclude that I like Brahms just fine, except for the symphonies and the academic overture.

[calimac]

Symphony San Jose improved its cello section from the awkward squad to one of the orchestra's highlights by merely re-seating them.

I love love love the Brahms B-flat major sextet. And especially for the cello solo at the end of the slow movement. It is one of my favorite 19C chamber music pieces. The G major is also very good. I'd go to any performance of the two together like a shot, and have had the opportunity a couple of times. Were I in town I would surely have joined you.

You should try other Brahms chamber music. I'd especially recommend the 3 piano quartets (in particular Op. 25) and the piano quintet, Op. 34.

[bibliofile]

This sounds like a brilliant concert on multiple levels. I love that Roman talked about his life as an integral part of the performance, rather than having some text in the program that people could read or ignore at any time. And inviting medical musicians to join him.

I mean, the concert-going tradition for classical music that I grew up with was just that there were these people who performed, and they interpreted the music. We didn't know much about them as people, only as musicians. Unless it was a student performance, in which case we knew some of the people directly, or it was Rachel Barton, who was in the news (getting caught under the commuter train that ran a mile from my parents' house).

(No masking? WTF, but not actually surprised.)