Book review: Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound

Kate Kennedy

480PP ISBN 9781803287034

Head of Zeus £30

Kate Kennedy’s book takes us on two parallel voyages of discovery. Outwardly it is a journal of her travels around Europe, tracing four cellists of the 19th and 20th centuries beset by misfortune and tragedy, discovering what befell them and their instruments. But at the same time it is her own coming to terms with the injury that silenced her own playing, through getting under the skins of these cellists, as well as through interviews with present-day players and makers.

Her accounts of her chosen cellists – Lise Cristiani, Pál Hermann, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Amedeo Baldovino – are peppered with ‘Interludes’, philosophical musings and explorations in art, science and lutherie. My feeling was that this mammoth book was in fact two books in one, and that the Interludes could have been made into a separate volume, allowing the engaging stories of the four cellists and Kennedy’s travels in their footsteps to be told more continuously.

Lise Cristiani, dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, went from charming Paris aged 17 dressed in white, to donning breeches and travelling with her Stradivari by dog sled and on horseback into the remotest parts of the Russian Empire, on a kind of extreme concert tour.

Pál Hermann, chosen by Milhaud to premiere his First Cello Concerto in the Salle Cortot, Paris, in the late 1930s (Kennedy plays the work there to Hermann’s 90-year-old daughter Corrie), had his burgeoning international career tragically stripped away as he tried to evade the Nazis. Kennedy’s quest to find his Gagliano cello, rescued when Hermann could not be, runs right through the book.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s incredible story, told in her own book Inherit the Truth, recounts how being a cellist literally saved her life in Auschwitz as she dodged death to play in the camp orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino, Italian-born cellist of the Trieste Piano Trio and owner of the ‘Mara’ Stradivari, was shipwrecked with the trio en route to a gig in South America. Kennedy travels in both their footsteps to Poland and to northern Italy, where more haunting tales are uncovered.

All four stories are fascinating, often disturbing, always gripping. Kennedy is an indefatigable cello detective and writes movingly and poetically. Highly recommended.

JANET BANKS