Joseph Haydn penned his Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major between 1761 and 1765, but it would be 200 years before anyone heard it.
That’s because the piece somehow got placed in the Prague National Museum, where it wasn’t discovered until 1961.
Which makes this weekend’s performance with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra featuring the rising young cellist Joshua Roman seem almost like a premiere of sorts.
The piece has been heard in Tucson — most recently when the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performed it in February 2013 with UA Presents — but never with the TSO.
“For hundreds of years people would write their version and sort of pass it off as having just found a Haydn C major Cello Concerto,” said Roman, who is making his TSO debut under the baton of guest conductor David Danzmayr of Austria, music director of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra. “There are a lot of fake C major Cello Concertos out there, but this one has been authenticated as the real deal. It’s just crazy that the world premiere was given in the 1960s instead of in the 1700s.”
The Haydn Concerto very nearly became a signature work for Roman, who spent two years as principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony when he was in his early 20s; he’s now 31. He first learned the piece when he was 10 or 12, he recalled, and played it for the first time in public with the San Francisco Symphony in 2010.
“And I’ve played it a lot since then. That and the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations for a few years. I could count on playing both of those several times each season,” he said.
But it’s been about a year since his last Haydn performance. This season he’s been focusing on Dvorák.
Roman describes the Haydn as a “typical classical piece — three movements: fast, slow, fast,” but the allure of the piece had a lot to do with the time when it was written.
“There weren’t a whole lot of cello concertos back then,” he said. “We don’t have one by Mozart, for example. We don’t have one by Beethoven. There are a few Bach concertos … but there were only two Haydn (cello) concertos. This is the very, very joyful one. I especially like the second movement. It is just beautiful and stately music.”
The San Francisco Chronicle in its review of Roman’s 2010 performance said the cellist “coaxes sounds of remarkable beauty from his instrument. … His technical command was equally impressive, especially in the virtuosic finale. It’s rare to hear a cellist tear through this high-flying passagework so beautifully and precisely — with never a note out of tune or out of place — and rarer still to hear it done with such offhanded panache.”
Roman, who has been playing cello since he was 3, also has dabbled in pop music, playing electric guitar and jazz bass in addition to being lead singer in a band when he was in high school. In 2011, he joined electronica DJ Spooky for a video remix of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Place.”
“I try to be very careful about what I do because I don’t want it to eat into the time of what I’m doing and to sort of confuse myself and others about what I’m all about,” he said.
“But it’s one of those things that if it completely stopped I would feel wrong about that. So I am always looking for ways to keep it alive.
“I will never stop playing Bach and Dvorák, but I also need to groove a little bit,” he added.
