Cellist celebrates 42nd season with Julliard
Joel Krosnick is winding up his final season playing with the Juilliard String Quartet, but the cellist isn’t thinking of it as a good-bye to colleagues and audiences.
“Farewell tour couldn’t be less accurate if you tried,” Krosnick said in a phone interview. “It’s just my 42nd season in the quartet.”
Of all the memorable moments since joining the quartet in 1974, he talked about the first time he played with the ensemble in New York. It wasn’t at a concert.
It was in a live television appearance.
“I think it was on CBS-TV and it featured the Juilliard and the Modern Jazz Quartet. It was part of a series (of programs) of the art of music,” Krosnick recalled.
He remembered preparing for the telecast.
“I still didn’t have an apartment in New York at that point. I had a hotel room. I had to go for a camera rehearsal and sound check at 8 a.m. … I had to be in tails. It was September and it was still pretty hot,” Krosnick said.
I was self-conscious. I carried a briefcase and the cello walking west on 57th street. I was embarrassed starting out but no one cast me a second look.”
The Juilliard — one of the world’s premier string quartets — will be in a Chamber Music Albuquerque-sponsored concert on March 13 at Simms Performing Arts Center.
The concert opens with W.A. Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C major (“Dissonance”).
Krosnick said it’s important to start with a great Mozart quartet, “which in terms of structural integrity and harmonic language has all those wonderful things that Mozart’s chamber works embody.”
That’s followed by Richard Wernick’s String Quartet No. 9, a commissioned work that the Juilliard premiered last year.
The program closes with Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor.
“The Debussy was in 1896 a new language for a string quartet. For the audience it will fall somewhere between the Mozart and the Wernick. And it will challenge the audience, especially in the last movement,” Krosnick said.
After having heard the Wernick, the audience may be reminded that not every old work is old, he added.
“We feel very strongly that this ongoing combination of playing great classical works and great works of our time is very important to us,” Krosnick said.
After leaving the Juilliard, he will continue to perform chamber music and maintain a full-time teaching schedule at the Juilliard School.
For Krosnick, teaching and playing are intertwined — each makes the other more informed.