Concert review: ‘Own every note’ – Zuill Bailey pays homage to his teacher Joel Krosnick
On March 18, 2012, Zuill Bailey gave a recital at Spokane’s St. John’s Cathedral of the first three Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach. Many in the audience realized that we were present at something out of the ordinary. To be sure, the playing was very good – wonderful, really – but there was more than that: Bailey was playing quite deliberately for us, determined that we feel the majesty, sweetness and sorrow in that music as powerfully and completely as he did. By the time he finished playing, some of us in the audience had been changed for good, and left the church determined to be more open and honest in our approach to music, and certainly determined to hear more of Bailey.
Little did we realize that that afternoon recital forged the first link in a chain that has bound Bailey to Spokane’s civic and artistic life for the succeeding thirteen years and counting, as he transformed the Northwest Bach Festival into Northwest BachFest – one of the finest chamber music festivals in the country. The most recent link was the exceptional recital Bailey performed with pianist Greg Presley on Wednesday night at Hamilton Studio.
It was exceptional in part due to its very substantial program of challenging music: the Préludes from the very same Bach Cello Suites Bailey performed in 2012, two complete concertos – the “Concerto for Cello and Winds” by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) and the First Cello Concerto of Camille Saint Saens (1835-1921) – as well as a group of popular encore pieces by Saint Saens, Rimsky-Korsakov, Jules Massenet and John Williams. Of greater note, and perhaps greater value was the autobiographical commentary offered by Bailey throughout the evening in which he explained the significance of each work in his own career and development as an artist.
The crucial figure in that development was Joel Krosnick, whose unexpected death at the age of 84 was announced on the day before Bailey’s concert. Krosnick, who was Bailey’s teacher at the Juilliard School and mentor for the rest of his life, was most widely known as the cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, arguably the greatest ensemble of its kind in the latter half of the 20th century and one of our country’s most significant contributions to the history of music. In Bailey’s mind, the theme of Wednesday’s concert changed on Tuesday.
What had been conceived of as a celebration of the cellist’s 40th year in the profession became a tribute to Krosnick’s unremitting adherence to the highest standards of artistic ethics. For Krosnick, the goal of the professional musician was to open as widely as possible the door admitting his or her audience to the joy of music. Period! Technical display for its own sake and other gambits by which a musician could increase his or her fame or bank account were to be regarded as distractions. Worse, they betrayed the promise each musician makes to the audience by simply walking onstage, and devalued the thousands of hours sacrificed to a career, not only by the artists themselves, but by their supportive family, teachers and friends.
In Bailey’s retelling, Krosnick took him on as a talented, skillful and ambitious young cellist and insisted that he make himself into much more by focusing on the impact he wished the music to make on his listeners, and subordinating all other considerations to that end. Krosnick insisted that Bailey “own every note,” and that is what we witnessed in every measure we heard on Wednesday night from the very beginning of the Bach G major Suite for Solo Cello, in which scarcely two phrases were alike, but were rather held differently to the light, exhibiting surprising differences in color, phrasing and articulation.
Bailey has recorded the six cello suites of Bach on two separate occasions, and the two versions are strikingly different, both from one another and from the performance at Hamilton Studio. What they all have in common, however, is total technical mastery, a determination to exploit the full resources of Bailey’s awesome Goffriller cello and a commitment to get his ego out of the way so that we might hear what Bach has to say.
This paradoxical blending of virtuosity and humility characterized Bailey’s rendition of all the works on Wednesday’s program, as different in style and structure as they were from one another. (Well … we might want to make an exception of the Rimsky-Korsakov “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which had much less to do with humility than good ol’ jaw-dropping virtuosity.) Much the same must be said for Greg Presley, whose contribution from the piano demonstrated the very same virtues. No mere provider of harmonic backdrop, Presley brought character, sensitivity and a broad variety of colors to an incredibly challenging assortment of scores, some of which – the Ibert Concerto, in particular – were not gratefully written for the instrument .
As he graduated from Juilliard and contemplated with some anxiety the challenges that lay ahead, Bailey turned to Krosnick for advice. His mentor knew that Bailey had kept his distance from the Suites of Bach, feeling unready to tackle the works that are widely considered to stand at the pinnacle of all music composed for the cello.
Bailey said Krosnick told him that the time had come for him to engage the Bach Suites, and that, through them, he would find himself. Bailey went on to say that, indeed, he found not only himself through the Suites, and a secure commitment to his career in music, but also – and here his gaze swept over the audience – “through the Suites, I found … you.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on Friday, April 18, 2025, to correct the dates of Bachfest performances that were incorrect because of a staffer’s error. The festival continues Friday night and Saturday afternoon.