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 Roger Lebow
Cello
(909) 621-8155, roger.lebow@pomona.edu
Cellist Roger Lebow has taught at Pomona College since
1993. A familiar figure in Los Angeles's musical
landscape, he was for a decade the Principal Cellist of
the late and much-lamented LA Mozart Orchestra, though
these days you'll most often run into him in recital,
with his chamber group Xtet (now in its 21st season),
with the Pasadena Symphony, LA Opera and other local
groups, or browsing through Vroman's Book Store, where
he is a threat to buy something in almost any section,
as long as it doesn't have an embossed cover. RL was
also the 4th cellist from the right, in the back near
the cimbasso and string basses, on the soundtrack of
your favorite movie.
Lebow is also on the faculty of Chapman University and
the Claremont Graduate University, and has for many
summers taught at the Henry Mancini Institute at UCLA.
Formerly at Occidental College, he has also been on the
guest faculty of CalArts, UC Irvine, and UC Bjoerling;
and in his dotage regards teaching and other musical
intervention as an increasingly central and fulfilling
part of his life.
RL has appeared as soloist in such arcana as Heitor
Villa-Lobos's Fantasia and the Cello Concerto by Arthur
Honegger (as well as standard repertoire by The Usual
Dead White Suspects). He gave the première, with the LA
Mozart Orchestra, of a new concerto by Byron Adams,
which he commissioned. A new-music advocate of too many
years' standing, he's also commissioned solos by Leo
Smit, Donald Davis, John Steinmetz, Leon Milo,
Jean-Pierre Tibi, and David Ocker, and participated in
dozens of chamber music premières. He has chamber
recordings on the Delos, New World, Water Lily
Acoustics, and Albany labels. As is curiously so often
the case with avant-gardistes, RL is also an ardent
player, on baroque cello and viola da gamba, of early
music.
In years past RL was the founding cellist of the
Armadillo String Quartet and the Clarion Trio, and he
spent several waterlogged years swaddled in Gore-Tex® in
Seattle with the Philadelphia String Quartet. He has
appeared as soloist and chamber player at the Oregon
Bach Festival and Cabrillo Music Festival. Other
memorable and printable encounters include string
quartet performances on a rafting trip through the Grand
Canyon, his college rock group opening for the Jefferson
Airplane in 1967, and participating in an
original-pharmacology performance of Terry Riley's In C
led by the composer.
Lebow has been a renegade classical music announcer on
NPR stations in Santa Monica and Seattle, and still
entertains radio dreams. The author of one good poem
(and a number of sphincter-clenchingly bad ones), he
toils over a hot Macintosh writing program notes and
album liner notes (or whatever the hell they’re called
these days).
He dwells in a small cottage in Sierra Madre with
librarian Wendy Schorr (who clandestinely brings home
books with embossed covers for him). Their son Theo is a
tenor studying voice at Mannes College of Music in New
York City. |
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