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Lead book review

Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello

Exploring the relationship between the cello and its player, Kate Kennedy describes how Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s musical gift enabled her to survive not just one but two Nazi death camps

17 August 2024

9:00 AM

17 August 2024

9:00 AM

Cello: A Journey Through Silence and Sound Kate Kennedy

Apollo, pp.480, 30

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism.

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