Event overview
Music, life-writing and how to write about what you can’t hear
In Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound, 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.
Writer, broadcaster and cellist Kate Kennedy studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music. She has played with period instrument ensembles throughout the UK, and published widely on twentieth century literature and music. Her books include: Literary Britten, The Silent Morning – Culture and the Armistice 1918, and edited with Dame Hermione Lee, Lives of Houses. Her biography Dweller in Shadows – A Life of Ivor Gurney was published in 2021 and Cello – A Journey Through Silence to Sound in the UK and US in 2024. Kate is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and a regular broadcaster for BBC Radio 3.
Eleanor Chan's Duet: An Artful History of Music is a startlingly original history of music which takes us on an unforgettable journey through sound and vision that will forever change the way we see music. An ancient shaman raises a conch shell to her lips in a painted cave. A Benedictine monk maps musical pitch on his hand. A scholar in a Shaolin monastery bends over a manuscript and invents a musical scale. A twenty-first century pop star takes her seat at a candy-floss pink piano. Music is interwoven into the fabric of our lives. We listen to it. Some of us play it. And from the earliest traces of human existence, we have attempted to capture it – in the instruments we decorate, the spaces we perform in, in kaleidoscopic paintings, medieval illuminated manuscripts and haute couture.
Eleanor Chan grew up in Brighton & Hove and studied at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is an art historian, singer and BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
This is a free, in person event and there is no need to register in advance.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Oct 2025 | 5:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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