Cello by Kate Kennedy

Cello by Kate Kennedy

Strikingly original' The Times
'Absorbing' Wall Street Journal

Shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize 2024
NPR Radio’s Book of the Day

‘Just as a cello’s voice is divided across four strings, each with its own colour and character, this is a journey in four parts, in search of four players and their instruments...’

In Cello, Kate Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic – and ultimately fatal – concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world’s greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women’s orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his ‘Mara’ Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked near Buenos Aires.

Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author’s reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy’s own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to start to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello – and, crucially, the absence of the cello – had meant to some other cellists, past and present.

Kate Kennedy has written an eloquent and multitextured homage to this warmest of stringed instruments – part quest narrative, part detective story, part philosophical meditation.

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 *
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 *

KATE KENNEDY is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music of her generation. She has published widely, including The Silent Morning: Culture and the Armistice, 1918, Literary Britten, Lives of Houses and Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (shortlisted by the Royal Philharmonic Society for their 2021 awards). She is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781803287034
Title	Cello
Author	Kate Kennedy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2024-08-15
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.