Strikingly original' The Times 'Absorbing' Wall Street Journal '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.
