Leonard Rose: All about the bow

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Leonard Rose’s biography reads like an American dream come true. He was born in 1918 in Washington DC to poor Jewish-émigré parents who had fled from imminent pogroms in Belarus (his father) and Ukraine (his mother). Rose spent most of his childhood in Miami, Florida, where he received his first serious cello lessons from Walter Grossman. After graduating from high school, he studied for one year with his cousin Frank Miller in New York and in 1934 was accepted by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to join the class of Felix Salmond (right). Following his studies, Rose served as assistant principal cellist of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, going on to become principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra and finally of the New York Philharmonic, under Artur Rodzinski, Bruno Walter and other prominent conductors of that era.