Gwen Krosnick

Cellist Gwen Krosnick has appeared across the world as recitalist, chamber musician, and exuberant advocate for music. She is known for her ecstatic and luminous voice; for her incisive, smoldering intensity; and for her deep, burnished palette of sounds at the cello. Her artistry, concert programming, and teaching center joy, immediacy, daring, and emotional connection between audience, players, and composers. Krosnick’s recent projects have included the Boston Beethoven Cycle – a series she curated with her colleague Ari Isaacman-Beck at the Pucker Gallery in Boston – which featured a chronological journey of the complete Beethoven string quartets, with contemporary works interspersed. She has presented cello and piano recitals across the East Coast and Midwest with colleagues Qing Jiang, Daniel Walden, Lee Dionne, and Emely Phelps; and major contemporary music performances of works by Lei Liang, Ralph Shapey, Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Jeffrey Mumford, Roger Sessions, Donald Martino, and Sofia Gubaidulina. Krosnick has been a passionate performer of new music for more than twenty years, and in upcoming seasons will premiere works written for her by Jeffrey Mumford, Richard Wernick, and Aaron Wolff; make recordings of new chamber music by Dylan Schneider and Daniel Godfrey; and give performances of works by Tania León, Victoria Bond, Joan Tower, James Lee III, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Shulamit Ran, Donald Martino, Ralph Shapey, Ezequiel Viñao, and Dorothy Rudd Moore.

Krosnick was the founding cellist of Trio Cleonice, with whom she performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia from 2008 to 2016. The group was in residence at the New England Conservatory from 2011 to 2014; gave frequent premieres and championed lesser-known works of the piano trio repertoire; and began an acclaimed community concert series, Trio Cleonice & Friends, which featured mixed programs of chamber music, world premieres, a vast programming range, and a devoted, longtime audience. In 2022, Krosnick became the new cellist of the Cassatt String Quartet, which group – founded in 1985 – focuses both on joyful reimaginings of standard quartet repertoire and on a huge range of contemporary music, including by composers whose backgrounds have traditionally been underrepresented on classical music stages. With the Cassatts, Krosnick’s upcoming projects include several appearances in honor of Tania León’s 80th birthday (including her piano quintet Ethos, written for the CSQ and Ursula Oppens); teaching residencies at Columbia University, Hartt, College of the Holy Cross, and SUNY Purchase; concert programs featuring exclusively women composers (including Dorothy Rudd Moore, Fanny Mendelssohn, Victoria Bond, and Florence Price); the release of premiere recordings of works by Adolphus Hailstork and Daniel S. Godfrey, featuring trombonist David Jackson and guitarist Eliot Fisk as collaborators; annual CSQ teaching and playing residencies in Texas and Maine; and performances across Europe, Asia, and the United States, including dozens of concerts in the Quartet’s home base of New York City. To celebrate the Cassatt Quartet’s 40th year in 2025, the group will premiere and carry a new string quartet written for them by Joan Tower.

Gwen Krosnick is a double-degree graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian Language and Literature alongside her cello studies; her Master of Music degree, with Honors, is from New England Conservatory. Her teachers have included Natasha Brofsky, Vivian Weilerstein, and Donald Weilerstein at NEC; Darrett Adkins and Brian Alegant at Oberlin; Geoff Nuttall at Stanford and Banff; and Seymour Lipkin and Laurie Smukler at Kneisel Hall. Krosnick is herself a dedicated teacher, and has served on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Vivace Cello Festival, New England Conservatory Preparatory Division, the New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music Program, and Junior Greenwood. She has given masterclasses at institutions such as Eastman, Bard, Oberlin, Hartt, College of the Holy Cross, Vivace Festival, the Cleveland Institute of Music, SUNY Potsdam, and Duke. During the summers, Krosnick teaches at Kneisel Hall, of which she is a longtime alumna, and where she has served as Artist-Faculty since 2019. She is delighted to begin teaching at Columbia’s Music Performance Program in 2024.