Seasoned photographer follows PSO on European tour
He’s captured Lebron James, the Obamas
When he’s photographing LeBron James, Kevin Garnett or Michelle Obama, Todd Rosenberg might get a couple of minutes with his subject.
But on the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s European tour, Mr. Rosenberg is spending every waking minute with his subjects, taking the bus with them, going on most of their flights, and chronicling their rehearsals and performances.
Concert tours are a central piece of the PSO’s mission, and the orchestra loves to show itself off to European audiences, as it does most years under music director Manfred Honeck. Unfortunately, most Pittsburghers can’t experience the PSO’s concerts at the BBC Proms, the Lucerne Festival or the Salzburg Festival.
That’s where Mr. Rosenberg comes in. He gives Pittsburghers an inside look at the tour, showing the challenges and highs of traipsing through Europe with doublebasses, cellos and French horns in tow. The tour of Austria, England, Germany, Romania and Switzerland continues through Friday.
“Basically, it’s to give people a window into what it’s like to move a 100-person orchestra and all their instrumentation through an amazing two-week tour,” he said.
Mr. Rosenberg, 49, has amassed an impressive photography career. A native of the Chicago area, he got his first camera for his bar mitzvah.
On assignment for the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, he was asked to shoot a rehearsal of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
under Sir Georg Solti. While he’d grown up going to the Ravinia Festival
near Chicago and even served as a busboy there, he never had much of an appreciation for classical music. During the assignment, a public relations staffer told him to photograph the orchestra during a crescendo. Mr. Rosenberg had just one question: “What the hell’s a crescendo?”
He survived that assignment — the PR person told him to shoot when the whole orchestra was playing — and it led to a long-term relationship with the CSO, with which he started touring in 2005. Along the way, he has shot photos of other civic institutions, such as Lyric Opera of Chicago and Lincoln Park Zoo, and fulfilled his childhood dream of working for Sports Illustrated, producing 15 covers for that magazine.
Other high-profile images include one of Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration, which made the cover of Life magazine, and a shot of Mrs. Obama, Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams for Sports Illustrated Kids. He also has photographed the LeBron Jameses and Serena Williamses of the classical music world, like cellist YoYo Ma and conductor Riccardo Muti.
His images are intimate looks at the PSO’s life on the road: the musicians’ luggage strewn throughout a hotel lobby, a celeste being carefully serviced, a goodbye kiss between a violinist and her husband, a cellist’s subtle smile during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. The pictures are available on the PSO’s tour blog and social media platforms.
“I’m not going to set things up,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “I want things to be organic.”
His photos capture the athleticism of orchestral playing but also the softer, human side of the tour, said Mary Persin, the PSO’s vice president of artistic planning.
“The images that he captures are visceral,” she said. “They’re alive. They somehow help translate and I think help lift out of the page the energy, the power, the brilliant finesse that the orchestra plays with.”
Mr. Rosenberg isn’t the first photographer to join the symphony on tour. Benjamin Spiegel played with the orchestra for 17 years before swapping his bassoon for a camera and becoming the orchestra’s official shutterbug from 1960 until his death in 1996. His work appeared in Life and Time magazines and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The PSO plans to post some of the collection in its digital archives.
In one of Spiegel’s photographs, from the symphony’s 1964 tour, a bassoonist practices in a tiny bathroom, in full sight of the toilet, with socks hanging from the shower curtain bar.
Such is life on an orchestra tour. Perhaps Mr. Rosenberg’s photographs will tell a similar tale.