Joel Krosnick, Longtime Cellist of Juilliard String Quartet, Dies at 84

Joel Krosnick, the admired longtime cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, who helped shape its championing of new American music as much as its commitment to the classics, died on April 15 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 84.

His death, from pancreatic cancer, was announced by the Juilliard School in New York City, where Mr. Krosnick was head of the cello department and had taught for 50 years.

Mr. Krosnick’s playing combined the two hallmarks of the Juilliard String Quartet’s renowned style: intensity and precision. He was ideally suited to inherit the mantle of his two cellist predecessors in one of the world’s longest-lived string quartets — and he was with the quartet, known as the Juilliard, longer than either, from 1974 until his retirement in 2016.

From its start, 70 years before Mr. Krosnick’s departure, the Juilliard committed to playing new music with the same devotion it brought to the classical repertoire, and to playing the classics as if they were new. Mr. Krosnick went right along, as at home with the searing abstract intensity of the cello cadenza in Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 2 as with the soulful meditations of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) or the spiky turbulence of Bartok’s quartets.

He recorded the complete quartets of all three composers with his fellow players, and they won Grammy Awards in 1977 and 1984 for their recordings of Schoenberg and Beethoven.