Alumnus Interview: Joshua Halpern (Cello '19)

Award-winning cellist and Curtis alumnus Joshua Halpern (’19) has appeared on stages around the world as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral principal cellist. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with artists including Jonathan Biss (Piano ’01), Anthony Roth Costanzo, Roberto Díaz (Viola ’84), Viviane Hagner, Gary Hoffman, Kim Kashkashian (Viola ’75), Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Anthony McGill (Clarinet ’00), Olli Mustonen, and Itzhak Perlman, and appeared at music festivals including the Ravinia Steans Institute, Music@Menlo, the Perlman Chamber Music Workshop, the New York String Orchestra Seminar, the Taos School of Music, La Jolla Summerfest, Musikiwest, and Krzyzowa-Music, with whom he has also toured extensively.

An eager advocate of contemporary music, he has worked personally with composers such as Curtis faculty member Richard Danielpour, Scott Ordway, Kevin Puts, Dai Wei (’19), Nick DiBerardino (’18), and the late Kaija Saariaho. During the 2019 season, he served as guest principal cello of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, including on tours to Germany, Taiwan, and China, and in 2020 served as cellist with the Banff Competition-winning Rolston Quartet. In 2023, he appears numerous times as guest principal cello with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, as well as guest with the Varian Fry Quartet.

In 2018, Mr. Halpern curated a solo tour across Colorado to bring classical music to unexpected places, including the state penitentiary, small-town saloons, bicycle shops, and more. Since then, he has continued bringing music to unique spaces, fostering connection and conversation with all types of people along the way. In 2021, he founded the Cultural Caravan, a Colorado-based organization operating at the intersection of small businesses, social-service nonprofits, and local artists. The Cultural Caravan has since presented over 50 artists with backgrounds ranging from Zimbabwean Afropop to Venezuelan jazz to Classical Music in dozens of concerts in coordination with over 40 local businesses and community organizations, reinvesting over $200,000 into the community to date.

Mr. Halpern completed his Artist Diploma at Curtis, where he performed throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America with Curtis On Tour, and served as principal cello of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra during the 2016–17 season. At Curtis, he studied with Carter Brey and Peter Wiley (Cello ’74). As an undergraduate at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, he studied with Desmond Hoebig (Cello ’79) and won the school’s concerto competition. He is currently a member of the Karajan Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker and is mentored by Ludwig Quandt. As a teacher, he has presented master classes throughout the United States and South America and has taught at Curtis Summerfest, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, and on faculty at the Brooklyn School of Music.

In the months leading up to the Cultural Caravan’s second, 10-day June Festival, Joshua Halpern discussed his inspiring journey to bring his dynamic nonprofit to life and the impact of Curtis’s Young Alumni Fund on its continued growth. He shares his experiences playing cello as a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker, talks about the importance of community engagement and collaborative programming, and fondly recalls his time here at Curtis.

As an alumnus of Curtis, what do you believe is the school’s most enduring impact on your life and development as a musician?

The richest part of my experience as a student there was being a part of that whole community. Whether it’s musical or social, you never know when or where you’re going to run into someone you were there with. There’s something special about maintaining those connections. Even when you’re not reuniting to make music together, I see someone from my time at Curtis, and we pick up right where we left off. It’s like taking a walking memory tour.

What are some of your fondest memories of studying with Carter Brey and Peter Wiley at Curtis?

Studying with the two of them simultaneously was interesting, and each of them was very different. Their separate pedagogies didn’t exactly come into conflict, but still—very different. Carter is an erudite, one-of-a-kind guy—with his whole approach to life. I remember one time, he and his New York Philharmonic String Quartet gave their debut concert at the 92nd Street Y. That same week, he played three performances of Don Quixote with the Phil and ran the New York City Marathon. There was another time that he took off to solo sail somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean without any navigation equipment. I don’t know where he finds the energy, but seeing him accomplish on all those fronts and seemingly doing it with ease was very inspiring.

Mr. Wiley was more enigmatic to me and fascinating for a whole different set of reasons. In our lessons, he would do this thing which, at the time, I questioned the pedagogical use of. I remember I was working on Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro. I played the first movement for him, and then he spent a while exploring just the first few notes of the piece. He played that first phrase so beautifully and out of time, with a freedom I felt I couldn’t be entitled to in performance. Now, I think back to it all the time, watching him explore color and inflection like that, appreciating every tiny nuance to make the music more beautiful.

I have a trio now and shared that anecdote with them once. Sometimes my pianist will ask, “How would Peter Wiley do it?” I try to fit in all that appreciation that Mr. Wiley infused into the first four notes of Adagio and Allegro, and it’s pretty much always better. Of course, it’s still my playing, but there’s that little pearl of his musical perspective that I can access just by thinking of him. It puts me in a more appreciative state of mind for the beauty of music.

Are there any particularly challenging moments where you had to rise to the occasion or poignant moments that you think of when you look back at your studies here?

Trump was elected in my first year. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the March For Our Lives also took place around that time. Life was political, and the streets of Philadelphia seemed vividly alert to the political unrest and dysfunction. But walking through the doors of Curtis, I felt like all of that was left outside; we were in this sheltered and focused environment where music was everything. It felt almost irresponsible to be so deeply obsessed with music when so much of such consequence was happening all around us. Starting in the second semester of my second year, I seriously asked myself whether I wanted to be a musician. It wasn’t that I wanted to run away from music—I wondered what I should be running to instead that might feel more immediately helpful.

I enrolled in a writing course at UPenn that semester. Two or three times a week, I spent three hours in a room with students from different backgrounds discussing the things they were curious about. We were all assigned to write an experiential essay placing us in the middle of the action of something, anything—the subject was our choice. We had to go out and find a story. I couldn’t have written about anything sillier—the Philadelphia Wing Bowl, this massive chicken wing-eating contest that precedes the Super Bowl. But other folks were writing about trans sex workers in Philadelphia or their personal experiences as immigrants to the U.S., and it was fascinating to watch people put their stories on the table and let the room unpack them. These conversations weren’t necessarily happening at Curtis, certainly not with such granularity.

My writing teacher was supportive of my writing and encouraged me to try a more personal story. So that summer, I did a solo cello tour of small towns throughout Colorado. I called up coffee shops, the state penitentiary, and other random spots to ask if I could come in and play. They didn’t need to pay me; I just wanted to bring in my music and see if I could connect with people. Everywhere I went, I met curious, interesting people who wanted to engage. I met so many nice people in Gunnison that I didn’t pay for a single meal. In Bailey, I played Bach for a vaccine-denying, Trump-supporting Jew for Jesus on his back porch, and by the end of our conversation, he was reconsidering what he thought he knew about the Iran Deal.

I realized that so much political discord arises from a deficit of empathy, and music can create space or the invitation for people to empathize with one another. I came back to Curtis for my third year, reinvigorated, and reconnected to what I was there to do.

Tell me about the Cultural Caravan, the Colorado-based 501(c)3 org you founded in 2021. I read that you’ve reinvested over $200K into the community over the past year. Very inspiring. How did this nonprofit come to life?

I really didn’t enjoy the remote music-making we were all doing during the early months of the pandemic—the self-taping, click-track, cut-it-together thing wasn’t scratching the itch for me. Of course, for a long time, we were all in limbo, but after a while, we were tip-toeing out to eat outdoors and shop, and I felt like something must be possible beyond home live-streaming.

I recognized two problems: artists couldn’t perform in their usual spaces, and local business owners had no choice but to operate from their site of businesses So, initially, the Cultural Caravan was a vehicle to bring safe, low-cost communal experiences to local businesses, and put money in the pockets of artists and attract awareness and support for our participating businesses in the process.

It started with the one or two people I knew in the musical community in Colorado. One was actually Bryan Dunnewald (’18), an organist at Curtis who grew up in Denver. He connected me with a few people, including Yumi Hwang-Williams (’91), the concertmaster at the Colorado Symphony, and a Curtis alumna, who has performed with us in the past and is appearing in our June Festival. By talking with these people, I was able to get a sense of what existing organizations in the area were already doing.

We had our big kickoff that May, but I don’t think I had raised more than $10,000 by that point and definitely didn’t have a season sketched out, but we pitched the vision to as many people in the philanthropic community as I could get to attend. It was all very speculative, but by the end of the summer, we had presented more than 30 events. Some were at restaurants where we would have a couple of outdoor seating for dinner and a show. Others were at retailers, farms, community centers—anyone who was local and would have us.

Since then, we’ve expanded to collaborate with social-service nonprofits and municipalities and performed in over fifty locations all over Boulder County. This season we were the artist-in-residence at the Boulder Public Library’s Canyon Theater, which had been shuttered since before the pandemic.

Boulder Food Rescue, which operates over 30 no-cost grocery program sites distributing food to people experiencing food insecurity, has been one of our most consistent partners. We invite the people they serve to our MainStage concerts and provide free tickets in rare cases when our events are ticketed. With our municipal partners, we’re able to lean on their knowledge of their communities, and in return, we combine their funds with our other streams of support to deliver much more comprehensive programming than they could accomplish alone.

It’s also really important to note that we don’t present just classical music. If a genre of music is being performed at a high level by a local artist, it doesn’t matter what it is or what cultural heritage it comes from. We’ll present it. And many of these artists are frequently pigeonholed, playing gigs where they must play music that will please the customer. We ask them to perform what feels most authentic to them, to tell their stories as truthfully as possible. It’s not a charity. We are endeavoring, whether in a concert space or not, to showcase the best artists, to unite essential pillars of the community, and give people a good experience and maybe even teach them about a culture they didn’t know before.

How has being a recent Young Alumni Fund recipient impacted the growth of this organization?

The funding we’ve received from Curtis has been instrumental to general program and project support. We’ve doubled our budget each year since we started, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without Curtis’s support and the support of many other organizations who see the value in what we do.

This year, we’ve presented our first-ever winter and spring programming, in which we’ve enabled local artists to bring collaborators from around the world to Boulder. And our June Festival, which runs June 8-18, features seven different MainStage concerts plus 12 community pop-up events all over the county—19 total events over the course of ten days.

The Cultural Caravan is mainly designed for the community itself, not necessarily for tourists. But, at the same time, if you were to visit Boulder and just follow the Caravan around, you would get an incredible sense of the community. Not only would you be dipping into a wide variety of neighborhoods, but you would also see over 70 artists from different walks of life and get to know tons of local organizations—we’re a microcosm of the whole community.

We’re one of the most community-engaged and wide-ranging musical organizations I know of, and it’s all happened pretty fast. And, of course, none of this is possible without financial support. This is to say, the support from the Young Alumni Fund has been huge.

You are currently a member of the Karajan Akademie, play cello as a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker, and are mentored by Ludwig Quandt. How has this experience been as you’ve carved out a new life in Germany?

I was at a music festival in Poland, and there were three Americans, including me, who were still based in the U.S., and others who had made the leap to Europe. Everybody suggested coming to Berlin, but I had just signed a new lease in New York. But I was staying in Berlin after the festival to perform more concerts. Since the audition for the Akademie happened to be during that time, I decided to submit the application.

My intent was to experience Berlin more widely, and there are so many interesting projects to get involved with outside the Phil. At the same time, I’ve been running back to the U.S. for lots of things, including a new piano trio [The Emil Trio], but especially the Cultural Caravan.

The musicians of the Berlin Phil have been really welcoming to me, and in the last few months, I’ve been part of different chamber music programs with orchestra members and done tours and concerts with them. And obviously, the orchestra is unbelievable.

Ludwig Quandt has been a mentor. He comes to music without a fixed ideology. He has an approach to the cello that I find very organic and natural. I also appreciate his approach to leadership. The principal players in the Berlin Phil are not conventional leaders like in most orchestras because there’s so much leading from within the section. I’m now on trial for principal cello of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, and I think about him a lot when I’m in that chair.

Watch the Emil Trio’s performance of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101,  at the Peter-Edel Kulturforum in October 2022. The Emil Trio is pianist Yannick Rafalimanana, violinist Nathan Meltzer, and cellist Joshua Halpern.

The phrase “entrepreneurial spirit” is often discussed with Curtis graduates. How does this expression apply to your path post-commencement, and what about the school that encourages this attribute?

Conservatories are in a tough spot because it’s their job to hone the skills of young artists and help them become great instrumentalists. This is especially true at a school like Curtis. Violinists come in dreaming of being the next Hillary Hahn (’99), and pianists look to Yuja Wang (’08). As a result, I think there’s somewhat of a stigma associated with community projects, which are often tagged onto more central programming or included to check off boxes so organizations appear more diverse, inclusive, or engaged in the community. They may even have to do it to be eligible for specific funding opportunities. So when you have a student body full of people who stand a decent chance of becoming the next superstar soloist, it’s hard to get them out into the community and see it as equally important.

What’s great about the Young Alumni Fund is that it showcases people who are pursuing their passion projects, which often exist off the beaten path of a performance career. It elevates community-minded and educational projects and shows how wide the path truly is. I know that I come the most alive when directly connecting with an audience and seeing music positively impacting someone who needs it. I know a lot of people who are like me in that way.

The core ethos of the Cultural Caravan is exactly that: making people—or a whole community—come alive through music. Everyone deserves part of a communal experience happening in your community. We all need art and culture, and we all need the option to experience it together. And I think that Curtis—through the YAF and other initiatives—is in a position, with a deep talent bench and other resources, in the middle of a vital city facing many different challenges, to make the most compelling case for music in that kind of way.

Curtis stresses the importance of alumni giving back and sharing the knowledge and skills they honed at the school. What do you enjoy the most about teaching young aspiring cellists?
I don’t have a lot of regular students. If I’m teaching, it’s usually a one-off lesson or a masterclass. In those settings, I enjoy trying to offer constructive feedback that will leave the student feeling more excited than when they came in. I don’t have a strong pedagogical point of view. I’m more interested in meeting students where they are and finding what activates them. You rarely have much time to do that, so you must ask yourself how much you’re actually able to transform them. But if you can share with them what you love about music and can find what they love about it, too, you can work together to bring that out try to bring that out. I find ideas coming from that place of inspiration and excitement has a lot of staying power.

Visit Joshua Halpern’s official website HERE. Learn more about the Cultural Caravan HERE.

Interview with Joshua Halpern by Ryan Scott Lathan.

Photo credits: 1.) Banner image courtesy of Joshua Halpern’s official website. 2.) Image courtesy of Musikiwest. 3.) Image of Joshua Halpern performing courtesy of the artist’s website. 4.) The Cultural Caravan’s June Festival, courtesy of The Cultural Caravan.org. 5. Mr. Halpern in a lesson with Carter Brey; Pete Checchia. 6.) Mr. Halpern and Peter Wiley at Curtis’s Field Concert Hall, courtesy of the artist’s website. 7.) Mr. Halpern teaching at Krzyżowa Palac, September 2019; photo courtesy of artist’s website. 8.) Joshua Halpern and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra cello section, February 2017; David DeBalko. 9.) Joshua Halpern and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra with Curtis on Tour in Poland under the baton of Maestro Osmo Vänskä, courtesy of artist’s website. 10-16.) Courtesy of CulturalCaravan.org and ELD Photography. 17.) Portrait of Mr. Halpern, courtesy of the artist’s website. 18.) The Emil Trio in Boulder, Colorado, on April 6, 2023, courtesy of the artist’s Facebook page. 19.) Mr. Halpern with Michelle Cann, Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies at Curtis, courtesy of the artist’s website. 20.) Joshua Halpern performing in a Curtis family concert; David Swanson. 21.) Mr. Halpern, courtesy of the artist’s Facebook page.