In the early 2010s, cellist Joshua Roman was making concerto debuts with major orchestras like the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, and Mariinsky Orchestra. He had a manager, a CD, and invitations to top festivals. Before that, he had spent two seasons as principal cello of the Seattle Symphony, beginning at age 22. He was also among the first classical musicians to develop a robust social media presence and engage with tech culture, launching an early YouTube channel and becoming a TED fellow in 2011. “I had done so many of those things musicians put on their list of successes,” he recently recalled, “but I didn’t feel successful at all.”
Though he also pursued imaginative projects as a composer and curator, Roman was still caught up in the ultra-competitive world of young classical soloists. “I had this idea that I really just needed the right people to give me the right concerts, and then later I could show who I really am.”
Flash forward to March 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic shut down concert life. Musicians everywhere were thrown out of work. Roman dove into online streaming, buying new camera equipment to push his career forward. In a bitter twist, it was only after the world began to reopen that he came down with COVID himself. In early January 2021, he became sick in Jacksonville, Florida, during one of his first concerto engagements after lockdown. Since then, he has never fully recovered.
According to Stanford Medicine’s Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome (PACS) Clinic, between 30% and 60% of COVID patients may have symptoms that last long after infection, including fatigue, “brain fog,” and shortness of breath.
I couldn’t play cello, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t walk up the stairs. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do, and all of a sudden I had to reckon with human frailty and the fact that no matter how hard I pushed myself, there are some things I couldn’t fix by pushing.
As weeks turned into months, he canceled engagements and even began to consider giving up the cello entirely. Eventually, a friend encouraged him to play casually at a summer solstice party. It was a transformative moment: “the cello immediately spoke to me, and its vibrations reminded me why I do what I do, and that it’s more than just loving music,” Roman described. “All of a sudden I felt a participation in the act of sharing music that had been a little abstract before. That led me to recommit myself to the cello and to do it in a different way.” Ingrained notions of performance perfection fell away, and suddenly he felt more grounded and confident in taking both career and musical risks.
The Immunity Project
Roman’s first post-COVID project was Immunity, which he will present on February 12 at Bing Concert Hall for Stanford Live. Last fall he released an album of the program, including the Prelude to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, George Crumb’s mysterious 1955 Sonata for Solo Cello, and new works by Allison Loggins-Hull and Caroline Shaw.
“Every piece that’s on the Immunity program is a piece that has been important on my journey with long COVID,” Roman said. “The Bach, for example, is the first piece I played when I picked up the cello again. Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas is a piece I played a lot because it felt physically good—there’s a beautiful meditative quality to it. And Allison Loggins-Hull’s Stolen was the last piece I learned before I got COVID. When I was freaking out about whether my brain worked at all, I checked to see if I still knew it, and it was all there even though I hadn’t played it in months. It’s an opportunity to get really gnarly and express things that need to come out so they don’t fester.”
He will also play one of his own compositions: the titular Immunity, which was the first piece he wrote after being sick. “Originally I called it Fuzz because I was thinking of brain fog, but instead of being a serious epic showing everything I’ve been through, it became an expression of joy.”
Saint-Saëns with the Stanford Medicine Orchestra
On the second half of the program, Roman will play Camille Saint-Saëns’s exhilarating Cello Concerto No. 1 with the Stanford Medical Orchestra, which is made up of volunteer performers including physicians, medical students, researchers, and Stanford Medicine staff. Founded in 2022 and led by conductor Terrance Yang, the orchestra is supported by Stanford’s Medical Humanities & the Arts Program (MedMuse), which integrates the arts and humanities into medical education, scholarship, and clinical practice.
As part of his residency at Stanford, Roman will also perform on February 11 for the Reller Family Concert Series at Stanford Hospital. He has often played for patients, their families, and medical staff around the country. Recalling an event at a COVID clinic in Portland, Oregon, he said: “Just walking into the room, I knew something special was happening, because it was the first time I’d ever played for people where I shared a group bond through this kind of experience.” He wants to demonstrate that even with a chronic condition, “I’m not going to wait around to get better before I have a beautiful life that I love living.”
One more selection on the Immunity album is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—Roman arranged the celebrated song for his own voice and cello, and now often plays it as an encore. “There’s this idea that you can’t really be in communion with people if you’re not somehow broken and vulnerable, and I think the song does such a great job of capturing that,” Roman said. “I also love singing and humming—breathing is a real challenge for people with long COVID, so being able to take those big breaths and play just feels so good.”