Cello
A Journey Through Silence to Sound
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Cello
Narrated by:
Kate Kennedy
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Kate Kennedy
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By:
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Kate Kennedy
About this listen
Cello is a group biography that weaves together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. The stories are those of the forgotten Jewish cellist Pal Hermann, who is likely to have been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania during the Holocaust; Lise Cristiani, another forgotten performer, who is considered to be the first female professional cello soloist and who embarked on an epic concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s taking with her a Stradivarius cello that can be seen to this day in a museum in Cremona in northern Italy; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played in the orchestra at Auschwitz and survived spells in both that camp and in Bergen-Belsen; and Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste piano trio, whose ‘Mara’ Stradivarius was lost in a shipwreck in the River Plate between Buenos Aires and Uruguay but later recovered from the water and repaired.
Interwoven with their remarkable and often moving stories are a series of interludes that offer a foil to the group biographies. These examine the themes explored in the narratives from different perspectives, drawing together essay-like musings, historical research, personal experience, and the author’s many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists.©2024 Kate Kennedy (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Critic reviews
Fascinating (Ivan Hewett)
Strikingly original (Kathryn Hughes)
Cello sings richly … The human leads are compelling and carefully drawn out by Kennedy's new research. But their instruments are almost more so ... fascinating (Alexandra Coghlan)
This lively, likable, and very sad book is structured as a series of movements and interludes ... Neither silence nor sound is absolute; the passage from one to the other is what matters. (Norma Clarke)
Rigorously sourced and meticulously researched ... It's hard to think of another book about a specific instrument that goes quite as deep as this - or, indeed any other instrument that could have inspired one. (Richard Bratby)
Wow!!
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Fascinating
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