From the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a><\/p>\n

By Joshua Kosman<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not every day you hear an instrumentalist at a classical orchestral concert sing a pop song as an encore. But crazy times demand crazy responses, as cellist Joshua Roman told the San Francisco Symphony audience in Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, July 30.<\/p>\n

So Roman \u201cwent out on a limb\u201d and followed up his fluid account of Schumann\u2019s Cello Concerto with a vocal rendition of Leonard Cohen\u2019s perennial \u201cHallelujah\u201d \u2014 crooning and growling, accompanying himself on the cello, and ultimately leading the audience in a brief but restorative sing-along.<\/p>\n

It takes, as they say, a very particular set of skills to pull off something like this. But Roman \u2014 who, in addition to being a formidable musician, boasts the easy, sunny charisma of a boy-band frontman \u2014 is just the person for the job.<\/p>\n

His appearance in Davies was a last-minute fluke, after the scheduled soloist, cellist Pablo Ferr\u00e1ndez, ran into visa problems and had to withdraw. The remainder of the evening, however, went ahead as advertised, including an impressive Symphony debut by the young Colombian conductor Lina Gonz\u00e1lez-Granados.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Roman, though, provided the main share of showmanship, coursing through the fast outer movements of the Schumann with a blend of precision and almost improvisatory freedom. In the central slow movement, he brought out a vein of sensuous melancholy that went straight to the heart.<\/p>\n

None of that quite prepared a listener for vocalism, though, in a spot where a more traditionally minded cellist might have followed up with a bit of Bach. Roman\u2019s turn as a singer came as yet another reminder that there are many other ways of celebrating that \u201csecret chord\u201d that Cohen mentions than the ones we\u2019ve become accustomed to.<\/p>\n

Read the full review.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the San Francisco Chronicle By Joshua Kosman It\u2019s not every day you hear an instrumentalist at a classical orchestral concert sing a pop song as an encore. But crazy times demand crazy responses, as cellist Joshua Roman told the San Francisco Symphony audience in Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, July 30. So Roman \u201cwent … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3633,3685,4010,3612,7061],"class_list":["post-9086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cello","tag-concerto","tag-joshua-roman","tag-review","tag-san-francisco-symphony"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9086"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9088,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9086\/revisions\/9088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/2325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}