Joel Krosnick, a longtime cellist at Juilliard String Quartet, helped shape the advocacy of American music as much as his commitment to classics, was 84 years old at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on April 15th.
His death from pancreatic cancer was announced by the Juilliard School in New York City. There, Crosnick was head of the cello division and taught for 50 years.
Krosnick's performance combines two distinctive features of the Juilliard String Quartet style: strength and precision. He was ideally suited to inherit the mantle of his two Cherrylist predecessors in one of the world's longest-lived string quartets. He was with the quartet known as Juilliard for longer than 1974 until his retirement in 2016.
From the beginning, 70 years before Mr. Crosnik's departure, Juilliard played new music with the same dedication he brought to the classical repertoire, and promised to play classical music as if they were new. Mr. Crosnick went straight to home, as well as the soul-rich meditation of Beethoven's Quartet No. 16 (op. 135) and the spiky turbulence up to Baltock's fourth, with the burning abstract strength of Elliot Carter's string quartet cellocadenza.
He recorded a full quartet of all three composers with fellow players, and won a Grammy Award in 1977 and 1984 for recordings by Schoenberg and Beethoven.
A typical evaluation of Krosnick's contributions was typical of the prestigious British magazine Gramophone, who wrote in 1980 about the slow movement of recording the G-major of Schuelliard's String Quartet No. 15 by Schuelliard in 1980.
Along with his longtime music partner, pianist Gilbert Karish, Crosnick had an active solo career, giving recitals in the US and Europe, and generally praised the recordings by Prokofiev, Hindemis, Debussy, Janasek and others.
His contemporary artists' direction was also celebrated. He and Kalish wrote in 1973 that of the recordings made with Carter's cello sonata, “The performances by both artists are amazing.” And in 1992, the magazine called Carter's quartet with his Juilliard colleague a recording by Mr. Crosnik.
This dedication to music in his time shaped Crosnik's recital repertoire. In 1984 he undertook a six concert series at the Juilliard Theatre in New York, entitled “The Cello: A Retrospective of the 20th Century America.”
Among the first concerts, he wrote with Mr. Karish, featuring works by Ralph Shady, Henry Cowell, Juilliard's first violin, Robert Mann and Donal Henahan of the New York Times, and the following: music. “
In an interview, Crosnick, who had a deep belief in composers of his time, said his daughter, cellist Gwen, “I am the one who has a strong belief in the composers of his time.
Critics sometimes followed him because his virtuosity made him better. In a recital that included two Bachcello suites, Henahan wrote in 1975 that Crosnik “set a ferocious tempo that could not be managed without dirty passages.” At the same time, he acknowledged Mr. Crosnik's skill, noting that he “plays his instrument perfectly.”
In a short film made after Crosnik's retirement from the quartet, Kalish called him a “complicated and extremely intense person,” adding that both Crosnik's recordings and his statement on music revealed he was carefully thinking about the exact effect he wanted to create.
“Once you know which type of sound or emotion is desired in a particular place, you need to know how to produce it with your instrument,” Crosnik said in a 2005 interview with the Internet Cello Association of Websites.
In an interview, fellow violent Samuel Rhodes told the quartet that “we understood the meaning of the repertoire and what it means to us,” adding that “he gave the quartet a new direction.”
Joel Crosnick was born on April 3, 1941 in New Haven, Connecticut to Morris Crosnick, a pediatrician and professor at Yale School of Medicine, amateur violinist Esther (Crosman) Crosnick, and concert pianist Esther (Crosman) Crosnick, who gave up his family career. According to Mr. Crosnick's daughter, music permeated the home, with Yale faculty and frequent chamber musicians.
Joel began playing cello at the age of eight, and a year later he was playing Haydn trio with his parents. At nine o'clock he was studying with Italian cellist Luigi Silva.
He attended James Hillhouse High School at New Haven and Columbia University, where he studied English and music and earned his bachelor's degree.
After playing recitals in Europe and New York in the late 1960s, Crosnick began to question his pursuit of a soloist career, he said in a film made after his retirement. He was leaning towards education and achieved his status as an artist resident at the California Institute of Arts in Southern California.
However, he had previously studied with Klaus Adam, a Juilliard cellist at the time. One day, his phone rang.
“I wanted a strong musical life that I knew they had,” Crosnick told The Times in 1981.
After he played with the quartet several times, he recalled, Mann said, “Look, we'll tell you a better story.”
Crosnick thought it was all over. Instead, he was asked to join the quartet.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Crosnick was survived by his son Josh and his wife, Dyna Straight Crosnick, a retired primary school teacher. His previous marriage to Judy August ended with divorce.
When he retired in 2016, Crosnick was the last member of the Juilliard String Quartet, who played with Mann, who left nearly 20 years ago.
Crosnick was “fully trained in every aspect of his performance,” his colleague Rhodes said. “He was passionate about music, so he showed it.”
