concert review: Joshua Roman

This was one of those concerts so strikingly unusual that I couldn't not attend.

Joshua Roman is a professional cellist whose career was derailed when he developed Long Covid in 2021. It hit him like a truck, with symptoms rather resembling chronic fatigue. Having played the cello every day for most of his life, he put it away and didn't touch it for months.

When he was finally able to get it out and start playing again, the first piece he played was the Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 1, pretty much the foundation stone of the cello repertoire. After so long away, the sheer joy of the physicality of playing and the nourishment he got from making music and from its sound struck him forcefully. It touched him inside, is the way he put it.

Music is for healing and nourishing the body, the emotions, the mind. It's a tool kit for wellness. That is the lesson Roman learned. Though he's never fully recovered, and will - he says - not be the same man again, he has been going around giving concerts illustrating this lesson, and this at Stanford was one of them.

In between talking about his experiences and what music means to him, he played a few unaccompanied pieces: the Bach Prelude, the medieval-inspired in manus tuas by Caroline Shaw, a Capriccio by Krzysztof Penderecki to allow for the need for chaos and craziness in life, and a couple pieces of his own. One of these, written during the original pandemic, was a duet written to express the need for playing together with others, with separate melodies for each of two cellos which interweave and layer on top of each other. He played this with Melanie Ambler, a Stanford medical student who plays healing solo cello concerts for critically ill patients and those in pallative care.

Then, for his favorite concerto, the Saint-Saëns First, Roman was joined by the Stanford Medicine Orchestra, conducted by Terrance Yan. The Medicine Orchestra? Yes, it's a project to bring artistic creativity into the busy lives of personnel at the Stanford Hospital and Medical School. And it shouldn't be surprising that many of those people play instruments, considering how many of the performers at Stanford undergraduate student concerts are revealed by their bios to be pre-meds.

Roman expressed his gratitude to be playing with "an orchestra of healers," and for an encore he offered another one of his solo pieces: he sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" - the original verses, which hardly anyone does in full - while accompanying himself with an imaginative cello line.

Roman's cello tone is rich and slightly nasal, but very light in ambiance. It soars rather than weighs down. As a session for healing the soul in a difficult time, this concert was - as the cliche puts it - what the doctor ordered.

But considering why we were here and what happened to Joshua Roman, why were less than 5% of the attendees wearing masks? What is wrong with people?