Cello

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound, written and read by Kate Kennedy.

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.

Critics Review

This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.
Hermione Lee
Kate Kennedy’s quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.
Jenny Uglow
Kate Kennedy has followed her cello heart, and it has led her on a fascinating and unusual path. An excellently researched, thoroughly absorbing account of a personal voyage of musical discovery.
Steven Isserlis
This is a beautiful, richly fascinating book – a love song to the cello which, as if a character, lives within the lives of those musicians who play it.
Stephen Hough
A wonderfully evocative journey of exploration and contemplation in the company of four remarkable cellists and their equally remarkable instruments.
Robin Lustig
Kate Kennedy’s fascinating and deeply moving book about the cello weaves a lifetime’s passion for the instrument as a performer with her skills as a historian. This absorbing exploration of remarkable instruments and their players through death camps, shipwrecks, and on into the cellos of the future is an embodiment of the deep companionship between musician and instrument. I was fascinated by insights which only a professional cellist could know and by entirely unexpected aspects of the instrument’s physicality. Above all, Kennedy’s book is a deeply humane tribute to the partnership between composer, musician and instrument, ‘the soul of music’ and is a huge achievement.
Gwyneth Lewis
Fascinating
The Telegraph
Strikingly original
The Times
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
The Spectator
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.
The TLS
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.
Gramophone
Absorbing
Wall Street Journal

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