biography

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 given major performances of contemporary works by Lei Liang, Jeffrey Mumford, Ralph Shapey, Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Roger Sessions, Donald Martino, and Sofia Gubaidulina. Krosnick has been a passionate champion of new music for more than twenty years, and in upcoming seasons will premiere works written for her by Richard Wernick, Aaron Wolff, Luke Hsu, and Jeffrey Mumford; make recordings of new chamber music by Dylan Schneider and Daniel Godfrey; and give performances of works by James Lee III, Roger Tapping, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Shulamit Ran, Tania León, and Dorothy Rudd Moore. In 2022, Krosnick became the new cellist of the Cassatt String Quartet, which group – founded in 1985 – focuses both on serious, 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 seasons will include several appearances in honor of Tania León’s 80th birthday in 2023 (including her piano quintet Ethos, written for the CSQ and Ursula Oppens); programs featuring exclusively women composers (including Dorothy Rudd Moore, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Florence Price); annual 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. 

Krosnick was the founding cellist of Trio Cleonice, with whom she performed concerts across the United States, Europe, and Asia from 2008 to 2016. The group was responsible for premiere performances and recordings of works by Richard Wernick, Arthur Berger, and Rodney Lister; in addition to the major piano trio repertoire, they frequently performed lesser-known trios by  composers such as Carl Czerny, Alexander Zemlinsky, Donald Martino, and Mario Davidovsky. Trio Cleonice shared several hundreds of concerts and residencies over their time together, including in some of the world’s most magnificent chamber music halls: the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Slovak Philharmonic in Bratislava, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Jordan Hall in Boston, among others. Following three years as the Graduate Piano Trio-in-Residence at New England Conservatory in Boston, the group began Trio Cleonice & Friends, an acclaimed community concert series in Brookline, Massachusetts, for which Krosnick served as Artistic Director. The Boston Globe critic, reviewing a concert of Widmann, Mozart, Ives, and Bartók, wrote: “The young trio has built a devoted local following, as was clear from the spirited community audience that packed into the church’s parlor room. The reasons were also not hard to discern. Tuesday’s gathering had the informal charm of a house concert, the vast programming range of festivals like Yellow Barn (where the trio has been in residence), and playing that was, at its best, bracingly expressive.”

Gwen Krosnick is a graduate of the double-degree program at Oberlin College and Conservatory, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian Language and Literature in addition to her studies with Darrett Adkins. She received a Master of Music degree with Honors from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she worked with Natasha Brofsky, Vivian Weilerstein, Roger Tapping, and Donald Weilerstein. As a young artist, Krosnick spent summers playing chamber music at Yellow Barn and Greenwood; and at Kneisel Hall, where she studied with Laurie Smukler and Seymour Lipkin.

Krosnick is 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, Oberlin, the Cleveland Institute of Music, SUNY Potsdam, and Duke. She is a trained teacher of myofascial release – and has presented workshops in Myofascial Release for Musicians – as well as of yoga (200-hour-trained), meditation (with specialty in Yoga Nidra), and anatomy, which influence both her cello teaching and her attention to the physical and mental wellbeing of her students. During the summers, Krosnick teaches at Kneisel Hall, where she has served as Artist-Faculty since 2019.

Away from the cello, Krosnick’s passions echo her joyously varied musical life. She is a serious writer on music – with pieces published in major periodicals and her program notes featured by major concert series and festivals around the U.S. – as well as a creative non-fiction essayist, as part of an ongoing writing group since 2021. She is a voracious reader, most especially of contemporary literary fiction, works by women of color, poetry of all ilks, cookbooks, Shakespeare, and (in a nod to her old Russian major) very long-form Russian novels. Krosnick is an accomplished and exuberant home cook, famous among colleagues and friends for dinner parties ranging from mostly-vegetarian Italian food to elaborate spreads of Korean banchan and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, she is mother to Anya, her beloved Australian Shepherd rescue dog, who keeps her company while she practices, writes, and cooks.