Chattanooga Times Free Press - ChattanoogaNow
Cellist Joshua Roman, CSO’s next guest, leads innovative generation of classical musicians
Cellist Joshua Roman has been hailed as a young new face of classical music for more than a decade. At 22, he became the principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony and later was artistic director of TownMusic and artistic adviser for Seattle’s Second Inversion.
Now at the ripe old age of 32, he wonders if the word “young” should be removed from his marketing material.
“Yeah, my manager said maybe we should take ‘young’ off the resume the other day,” he says with a laugh. “Part of me was like ‘Noooo.’”
While Roman, who will perform Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera on Thursday, Nov. 17, is aware of how he is presented in the classical world, it’s not something he thinks much about, nor does being the “hot new face” put added pressure on him, he says.
“I’m still not completely comfortable with the whole branding and marketing part of a career, and it is important. I know that people say that, but I don’t feel much pressure. The most pressure I feel is to not get bored with what I’m doing. I want to continue to be challenged.”
Which is one of the reasons he joined DJ Spooky in doing a cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” in 2010 as part of The Voice Project. He was named a 2011 TED Fellow and curated a concert last year for a TED summit for which he did some arranging, performing and song selection. Among the pieces he picked were Prince’s “Purple Rain” and “Let’s Go Crazy.”
“It kind of let people let their hair down,” he says of the Prince hits.
Roman was born in Oklahoma City and has lived in Mississippi, Seattle, California and now New York City. In fact, when we talked, he was moving into a new apartment.
“It’s cello friendly,” he laughs. “That’s kind of important.”
Roman started playing cello at 3 and by 6 announced to his cello-playing father and violin-playing mother that the cello would be his vocation. He calls the Elgar piece, one of two in the next CSO Masterworks concert, one of the most tragic of the cello concertos.
“It’s one of those staples, and I look forward to playing it again. I’m also excited to be coming to Tennessee. I lived in northern Mississippi near Memphis for awhile, so it will be fun to come down there to perform.”
According to CSO program notes, Elgar’s Cello Concerto was the composer’s last notable work, composed in the aftermath of World War I. A critic at the time called it “very simple … but with a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity.”
Th e other selection of the evening is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The composer is said to have had a love/ hate relationship with the work, at times taking pride in it and at other times repelled by it.