When you encounter Ernest Bloch's "Schelomo," you're struck by an immediate feeling of profundity and deep emotional vulnerability. As cellist Joshua Roman recalls, "The first recording I heard was of Leonard Rose on vinyl, and it struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces in the repertoire."
Now "Schelomo" will be Roman's swan song as Seattle Symphony's principal cellist. The 24-year-old string phenom is leaving at the end of this season to pursue a solo career.
Described by Bloch as a rhapsody for cello and orchestra, the piece is loosely based on Ecclesiastes, sometimes attributed to King Schelomo (Solomon). From approximately 1912 to 1926, Bloch turned his attention to his Jewish roots. Other composers may have referred to Jewish themes, but Bloch was one of the first composers to fully integrate Jewish material into his compositions.
As the composer wrote in program notes for a 1933 performance of "Schelomo," "I was saturated with the Biblical text and, above all, with the misery of the world, for which I have always had so much compassion."
This feeling flows through the piece. Five times the music rises quietly from the cello to spectacular orchestral culminations. Each time new emotions are engaged, ending in the famous outcry in Ecclesiastes "vanity of vanities" before finally fading away.
"Schelomo" is Bloch's most famous and most performed piece of music. Its durability, when most of Bloch's other major works are seldom heard on the concert stage, can be attributed to the range and sound required of the cello part.
As Roman explained, "It's very passionate, very songful, very much a 'cello piece.' I think it is one of those pieces that personifies the popular conception of what the cello sound is. It's both mellow and operatic at the same time."
Roman will perform the piece as part of a concert that also features Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass — a lush, melodic work that combines dissonance and consonance — and Cesar Franck's final orchestral work, Symphony in D Minor.
In the immediate future, Roman plans to perform, record and direct TownMusic, the "exploratory classical music series" he inaugurated at Town Hall last year. He will return to Seattle Symphony next season to perform David Stock's Cello Concerto under the direction of former Oregon Symphony Maestro James DePriest.
Meanwhile, "Schelomo" is an appropriate send-off. The emotional variety and the music's transformation into a subdued ending suggest both lamentation and something bigger yet to come.
As the cellist says, "My goal with my music is to be an open and honest communicator, and I hope that people hear that. People shouldn't think of this as a goodbye or that they can forget me, because I'll be back."
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