It’s hard not to reach for the old musician cliché that my favorite piece is whichever one I’m playing at the moment. But there’s a reason that old chestnut won’t go away, I think; for me, it’s in part because when you’re deeply absorbed in analyzing and interpreting a piece – in making it come alive, and finding what you love about it and want to share – there is a way in which the rest of the world falls away. It’s not that any one piece really takes permanent priority over any other (although there are 16 that do, for me); but my capacity to love and be fascinated by the music I am playing — whether it’s totally new to me, returning to an old friend, or a piece I’ve loved for a long time — is pretty endless.

So here’s a few favorites that have lately been on my music stand or, more accurately, in the very organized-chaos halo of music that sits on the floor of my studio, surrounding my music stand: Brahms Piano Quintet, the Archduke Trio, and Schubert B-flat (all pieces I’ve gotten to return to, this year, after more than a decade away!); forever Smetana Trio and the Dumky (if I had to narrow down my favorite trios…thankfully, I don’t); Mozart Divertimento, forever, forever, forever (if you list another piece of Mozart chamber music we can add it here, too, by default – I love him beyond  – and, while we’re at it, there’s few places I’d rather be than sitting in the cello chair playing a Haydn quartet); all the Beethoven Quartets (those are the sixteen I mentioned before), but lately my quartet’s been deep into 18-1 so it’s been especially joyously lodged in my heart, especially the coda of the last movement. Almost all Dvořák, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev – so much Russian and Eastern European music feels deeply personal to me, because I was a Russian major in college and it feels like that literature gave me my own special lens through which to love this music. Ralph Shapey Krosnick Soli (my parents’ wedding gift from Ralph, and one of my favorite solo cello pieces in this whole enormous world); Don Martino Parisonatina al’Dodecafonia (which used to be my favorite piece on my Dad’s long, magnificent programs of solo American cello music). Dorothy Rudd Moore – one of my heart composers – and in particular her quartet, Modes, which stuns and melts me whenever the CSQ comes back to it; and her solo cello Baroque Suite, too, but most especially the staggering, heartbreaking Dirge and Deliverance for cello and piano. There are pieces I love that I don’t always love to play, if that distinction makes sense, too: Poulenc Sonata, in my top-top-top-est tier of most-beloved cello and piano works, makes me laugh and cry with both love and a not-inconsiderable amount of terror; Charles Wuorinen’s Grand Union, for cello and drums, caused me to wake up in a cold sweat for the better part of six months, though I’ll always love it (from afar, perhaps) for the enormous ways it helped me grow.

There’s a handful of my most-beloved chamber music that I’ve still not yet learned –which occasionally makes my heart ache at the same time that it gives me great joy to anticipate those. My first Mozart G minor Viola Quintet is next season (be still my heart), which is such a joy; someday before long I hope I can do the E-flat, too, which is late-Mozart perfection as far as the eye can see. Also coming up next season – my first time with it!! – is Brahms G major Viola Quintet! In a way, it’s an enormous treat getting to do certain of these great pieces when one is a little further along in finding one’s voice and assurance at the instrument: that Brahms, for instance, has a famously difficult opening for the cello, with the upper voices making huge amounts of celebratory noise up top while the cello plays an unusual and thrilling bass-line-register melody. If I’d played it ten or twenty years ago I would have been thrilled but struggling like mad to make enough sound! Now I can just release my shoulders, put my feet on the ground, and take pleasure in the complete glory and exuberance of that moment! I can’t wait.

I am often thinking about music by the great American composer Ralph Shapey, who was one of my Dad’s closest friends and with whom I had a very special penpal friendship when Ralph was in the last years of his life and I was in high school, realizing how much I desperately wanted and needed to make my life in music. Ralph’s Evocation No. 2 is on my wishlist, and though it’s one of my favorite pieces of his ever, it may take a while to make it happen: it’s for piano, cello (necessarily amplified, because:), and timpani – a huge swath of them on stage, to huge dramatic and emotional effect. I also adore Ralph’s Songs of Life, for cello, piano, and voice; and his staggeringly gorgeous Solo Duo Trio for cello and tape (the tape is a recording of the cellist in real time, playing the 1st, then the 1st and 2nd, cello parts!); it was written for my Dad, as many of Ralph’s cello works were ( except for Prelude and Scherzando, which is all mine, sent as the next letter one summer while Ralph and I wrote letters together) and may be among my favorites of Ralph’s music. Someday before long, I also do want the CSQ to play his quartets – of which there are 10, each gorgeously  thorny and complex, deeply romantic and personal.

And, speaking of quartets – I’ve only been in mine for a few years, now, and while we’ve done lots together (and I played lots of quartets in the years before joining the CSQ!), I can’t help but feel, greedily, like I want to make up for the few decades I spent not as a quartet cellist. So I’m eager to do the two Bartóks I’ve never played (the 2nd quartet, and the 3rd  ); the Debussy and Ravel Quartets, and someday the Dutilleux; the Berg Lyric Suite and Op. 3, and all the Schoenbergs, please!! Next season we’re carrying Shostakovich’s 14th Quartet, written for the cellist of the Beethoven Quartet (and thus with a peculiar and wonderful notion about the role of the cello, and therefore the viola, and so on…); and I can’t help but eagerly await more Shostakovich, with my Russian-major heart, and the many (almost all) Dvořák Quartets I’ve not yet played. My quartet carried Florence Price’s 1st  Quartet for the last season, and I fell so head-over-heels in love with it that I can’t wait for us to learn her 2nd , too.

No instrument does quite what the cello does. The range of sounds – the ways I can explore going places that are high and fluttery, tender and intimate, deep and ferocious – just feels endless, and endlessly provocative and inspiring for me. People talk often about the way string instruments echo and mimic the human voice, and as a major opera- and art song-lover I (happily) think it’s true; but I also, perhaps not entirely objectively, think the cello captures it better than anyone else. In part that’s simply because the register can do more (the cello can play high; the violin can’t play low!), but I also think there’s a tremulousness, a vulnerability, a poetry that the cello inhabits – at least I hope it does, when I’m playing how I want to play – that is unlike anything else but the voice.

Aside from how much I love the instrument itself, I love the roles the cello plays in all the chamber music I get to explore: the way in which I am often (especially in string quartets) not the primary voice, but instead continuously permeating the sound, character, and intention of every moment in a more nuanced and complex way. I love the way I can both push and pull, make my colleagues comfortable and nudge them in new directions. The way the cello’s role is both constantly shifting and enormously, definingly important just feels like the one thing I know will capture my curiosity and imagination forever.

It would have to involve the same elements that make my heart soar about being a musician: spending my days absorbed in great art; getting to discuss and explore it with fascinating colleagues; teaching it to, and sharing it with, others so that they can feel as electrified and inspired by it as I do. So – I guess, loving books as I do (ferociously, insatiably, forever) – I might end up an English teacher or professor, perhaps. When I was a Russian major, my favorite thing (once I got reasonably fluent enough in my reading and writing) was translating literature: something about the particularity and emotional detail of picking just the right word for just the right moment felt so sensuous and so creative. I think I could have gone down a deeply satisfying and exciting path with English or Russian, in another universe.

But I’m glad I didn’t. My quartet colleagues can tell you that even on the most exhausting day, even when the pile of music I have to learn and play is as tall as I am, even when I want a break and a quiet morning at home more than I want a rehearsal or a concert…when I sit down to play, when I open the Op.18s on my stand and see that first F major motive – I’m overcome every single day with how lucky I am to do this. I feel it acutely, whether I’m in a quartet rehearsal or practicing at home with Anya by my side or teaching a gifted young cellist or an incredible group of young chamber musicians. It is – at least for me – the best job in the whole world.

Tea, in many different forms. Depending on the time of day it’s either black tea – brewed strong and topped with milk and honey –  or herbal (chamomile is my favorite, since childhood, but I dabble in it all), with a very occasional hojicha or matcha latte thrown in for good measure. If I know and love the shop (my favorite one nearby is the Katonah Reading Room, which also doubles as my favorite local indie bookstore!), I love ordering a slightly fancier tea drink: a London Fog, with Earl Grey, steamed milk, and either vanilla or lavender simple syrup; or a Carson Arnold, which is Earl Grey, cream, orange extract or essential oil, and maple syrup. (Both of those are so delicious iced, too; or with rooibos instead of Earl Grey if it’s the afternoon and I want to sleep at night!)

My website is home to lots of it: I wrote all the copy for the site, and more excitingly the “blog” section of this online home of mine holds program notes, short essays (on music and not!), and lots else, with more coming all the time. If you want to look outside the four walls of gwenkrosnick.com, you can start with a piece I wrote years ago for Strings Magazine about what I loved, during my years as a Bostonian, in the city’s chamber music scene (my trio’s beloved concert series, Trio Cleonice & Friends, appears in joyful technicolor ):

https://stringsmagazine.com/city-guide-boston-cellist-gwen-krosnick-on-chamber-music-and-trudging-through-a-blizzard/

Here’s an older piece, about a time (two decades ago?!) I spent intensively studying Russian – and going a little joyfully mad practicing Cyrillic in Oberlin’s very grey January – with two of my closest friends:

https://www.oberlin.edu/life-at-oberlin/stories/gwen-krosnick-08

And then meander over to the Cassatt Quartet’s Instagram handle, Facebook page, or website (I do the social media updates as well as lots of bio-writing  and other word-stuff for my quartet!); and my own Instagram and Facebook pages, where I think the words I write – not terribly frequently – are closer to miniature-form personal essays than to social media captions.

I read! 100ish books a year, at last count (lots in physical copy, lots in audiobook form during my commutes – literary fiction, rom-coms and , romances, thrillers, the very rare memoir, lots of poetry). Lots of dog snuggling, small amounts of yoga, absolutely zero traveling (I don’t like it, not for fun). Video games (really!), television that I love but that almost always falls into the category of low-impact after intense days at the cello (I make an exceptions for Jane the Virgin – my heart – and for Slings & Arrows, the Canadian dramedy set at a Shakespearean theatre company outside Toronto, which makes me cry in every episode, on every rewatch). My weekly writing class with the wonderful weekly writing class with Abby Rasminsky is one of the biggest joys of my life, , and I love to cook, eat, think about food, write about food.

Funny you should ask! Do I ever. You can read all about her here, and if you’re craving more you may want to mosey over to my Instagram handle, which almost always has a view of my sweet girl in my stories or my first few recent posts.