Joel Krosnick, the admired longtime cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, who helped shape its championing of new American music as much as its commitment to the classics, died on April 15 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 84.
His death, from pancreatic cancer, was announced by the Juilliard School in New York City, where Mr. Krosnick was head of the cello department and had taught for 50 years.
Mr. Krosnick’s playing combined the two hallmarks of the Juilliard String Quartet’s renowned style: intensity and precision. He was ideally suited to inherit the mantle of his two cellist predecessors in one of the world’s longest-lived string quartets — and he was with the quartet, known as the Juilliard, longer than either, from 1974 until his retirement in 2016.
From its start, 70 years before Mr. Krosnick’s departure, the Juilliard committed to playing new music with the same devotion it brought to the classical repertoire, and to playing the classics as if they were new. Mr. Krosnick went right along, as at home with the searing abstract intensity of the cello cadenza in Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 2 as with the soulful meditations of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) or the spiky turbulence of Bartok’s quartets.
He recorded the complete quartets of all three composers with his fellow players, and they won Grammy Awards in 1977 and 1984 for their recordings of Schoenberg and Beethoven.
Typical of the appraisals of Mr. Krosnick’s contribution was that of the authoritative British magazine Gramophone, which wrote in 1980 about the slow movement of the Juilliard’s recording of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G Major, noting: “The cellist matches the mood to perfection here, and the tempo is precisely judged.”
With his longtime musical partner, the pianist Gilbert Kalish, Mr. Krosnick also had an active solo career, giving recitals in the United States and Europe, and recording works by Prokofiev, Hindemith, Debussy, Janacek and others, generally to critical acclaim.
His renditions of contemporary artists were also celebrated. Of the recording he and Mr. Kalish made of Carter’s cello sonata, Gramophone wrote in 1973 that the “performance by both artists is magnificent.” And in 1992, the magazine called Mr. Krosnick’s recording of Carter’s quartets with his Juilliard colleagues “monumentally authoritative.”
This devotion to the music of his time shaped Mr. Krosnick’s recital repertoire. In 1984, he undertook a six-concert series at the Juilliard Theater in New York, entitled “The Cello: a 20th-Century American Retrospective.” Of the first concert, with Mr. Kalish, which featured works by Ralph Shapey, Henry Cowell and the Juilliard’s first violin, Robert Mann, The New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote: “Both Mr. Krosnick and Mr. Kalish threw themselves into their work with tremendous energy and dedication. Their response to the program’s varied compositional styles was sensitive and their joint virtuosity could hardly have been more thoroughly put to the service of the music.”
Mr. Krosnick believed deeply in the composers of his time, his daughter, Gwen, also a cellist, said in an interview: “Their music mattered to him. He loved those languages, and they changed the way he heard Beethoven.”
The critics sometimes went after him for letting his virtuosity get the better of him. In a recital that included two Bach cello suites, Mr. Krosnick “set blistering tempos that could not be managed without some smudged passagework,” Mr. Henahan wrote in 1975. At the same time, he had to acknowledge Mr. Krosnick’s prowess, noting that he “plays his instrument consummately.”
In a short film made after Mr. Krosnick’s retirement from the quartet, Mr. Kalish called him a “complex and very intense person,” adding that both Mr. Krosnick’s recordings and his statements about music made it clear that he thought carefully about the precise effect he wanted to produce.
“Once we determine what type of sound or feeling is desired in a certain place, then we have to figure out how to produce it on the instrument,” Mr. Krosnick said in an interview with the website Internet Cello Society in 2005. “We must endlessly experiment.”
In an interview, the violist Samuel Rhodes, a colleague, said Mr. Krosnick had brought to the quartet an “understanding of what the repertoire means, and emotionally what it means to us,” adding: “He gave a new direction to the quartet.”
Joel Krosnick was born in New Haven, Conn., on April 3, 1941, to Morris Krosnick, a pediatrician and professor at the Yale School of Medicine, as well as an amateur violinist, and Estelle (Crossman) Krosnick, a concert pianist who gave up her career to care for the family. Music permeated the household, and there were frequent chamber-music parties with faculty members from Yale, Mr. Krosnick’s daughter, Gwen, said.
Joel began playing the cello when he was 8, and a year later was playing a Haydn trio with his parents. At 9, he was studying with the Italian cellist Luigi Silva.
He attended James Hillhouse High School, in New Haven, and Columbia University, where he studied English and music, earning a bachelor’s degree.
After playing recitals in Europe and New York in the late 1960s, Mr. Krosnick began to have doubts about pursuing a career as a soloist, he said in the film. He was leaning toward teaching, and took a position as an artist in residence at the California Institute of the Arts, in Southern California.
But he had previously studied with Claus Adam, the Juilliard’s cellist at the time, and one day his phone rang: It was Robert Mann, the Juilliard’s founding violinist, inviting him to audition for the quartet.
“I wanted the kind of high-powered musical life I knew they had,” Mr. Krosnick told The New York Times in 1981. “The day I auditioned, my body woke up at 4 in the morning and I started practicing. I probably had never wanted anything so much.”
After he had played with the quartet a few times, he recalled, Mr. Mann said, “Look, we’d better talk.”
Mr. Krosnick thought it was all over. Instead, he was asked to join the quartet.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Krosnick is survived by a son, Josh, and his wife, Dinah Straight Krosnick, a retired elementary schoolteacher. An earlier marriage, to Judy August, ended in divorce.
When he retired in 2016, Mr. Krosnick was the last member of the Juilliard String Quartet to have played with Mr. Mann, who had left nearly 20 years earlier.
Mr. Krosnick was “completely trained in every aspect of playing,” his colleague Mr. Rhodes said. “He had a passion for music, and he would show it.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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