Heard But Not Seen

As the principal cellist of the Chicago Lyric Opera and as the principal cellist of the American Ballet Theatre orchestra, Daniel Morganstern spent more than four decades performing virtually every cello solo in the opera and ballet repertoire from the orchestral pits of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and the Civic Opera House in Chicago. He was often heard on radio and television broadcasts accompanying great singers like Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Joan Sutherland, Samuel Ramey, and Renee Fleming, and great dancers like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, and Rudolph Nureyev, but he was never seen by the audience. Following his retirement from the Lyric Opera in 2012, Mr. Morganstern assembled a retrospective of his career, beginning with his musical coming of age during the early 1960s, a true golden age of opportunity for musicians in America. He offers a lively picture of the times, gives candid portraits of his teachers, particularly Leonard Rose, and presents human sides of the many conductors he worked closely with during his long career.