Here are a few photos of our most recent day of filming for an ongoing project, a documentary about the great American cellist Leonard Rose.
Rose was the first American-born and trained cellist to achieve a world-class solo career. He played in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, and as principal cellist in the Cleveland Orchestra and New York Philharmonic under Artur Rodzinski, before making the courageous decision to support himself as a star soloist. Unusually, he also developed into as a marvelous chamber musician, performing and recording with such artists as Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin, and Glenn Gould. For most of his career he was also a perceptive teacher whose influence is still felt today. (Yo-Yo Ma was a pupil.)
I was in the DC area on Tuesday and Wednesday for our latest interview. This was an important one, as our subject was none other than Arthur Rose, the cellist’s son. Art was full of helpful information about, and insights into, Rose’s personality, his family life, and his personal dealings with his associates.
Art still works in radio after half a century as an engineer. This room is adorned with a Victrola, a vintage radio, and a harpsichord of Art’s own construction. In an adjacent room is a clavichord he also built. The walls are hung with inscribed photos of a number of Rose associates, including Pablo Casals, Jascha Heifetz, and Dimitri Mitropoulos.
Art also allowed us access to unpublished photos, a manuscript of a Rose memoir, with handwritten corrections, that the cellist was at work on at the time of his death, and rare audio recordings such as the world premiere performance of Alan Shulman’s Cello Concerto, which Rose never recorded commercially. All very exciting.
That’s H. Paul Moon behind the camera. Paul and I met when I interviewed him on the radio prior to the PBS broadcast of his award-winning documentary “Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty.” I conduct all my interviews for the current project off-camera, with the intention of having the subjects tell Rose’s story themselves, through the magic of attentive editing.
We have a few more interviews before we wrap, at least one of them with a classical music legend. Paul has many projects going simultaneously, but we are getting there.
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