Seattle recruits a Youtube cellist
mainNathan Chan, who starts this week as Third Chair Cello in the Seattle Symphony, has a Youtube channel with 6.1 million views ad is generally as cool as can be.
The things you have to do these days to win an audition.
Good for him, but enough with this “recruits,” “snatches” etc. business. Presumably he won an open audition for the job against a large number of other excellent cellists. His YouTube exploits might have helped get him into the audition, but not any further.
His youtube channel likely had nothing to do with his audition success. He’s clearly a fine cellist joining a fine orchestra. That’s the only news here.
Indeed. If there’s anything on YouTube to explain part of his audition success, it would be this… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byZiNaeY6QA
Nathan is an extraordinarily fine cellist and has been a remarkably gifted musician since he was a small child. There’s nothing surprising in the fact that he also relates to the wider world via social media, as do most of his generation, or that he explores (with great success) outside the narrowly defined box of “classical” music. Anyone who knows anything about the world of professional orchestra auditions in the US knows that his YouTube presence would have no impact, except possibly to the negative, on his even being invited, much less winning. But of course it’s not as clickbait-y to say that an excellent musician is taking up a well-deserved position.