….but still a cellist, last time I checked, and, one can hope, a cellist with a left hand that remains, as Janos Starker says through his deeply Hungarian pack-a-day, “organized.” Playing Bach has a way of demanding as much.
And struggles with the mercurial Robert Schumann continue, in case you missed it or are in need of a (slightly flawed in its application) syringe from a very sensitive reader of romantic literature in Dusseldorf, circa 1853.
There is something comforting about trying to scale the walls of the cello canon, at least when the bloody mountains of historical wars in East Asia are the alternative. Somehow all those arrpeggios and scales in thirds don’t look so bad anymore.
Which is my way of saying that I’m stepping back from examinations of Kim Jong Il’s cranium and cogitations on Japanese war crimes, and taking a break from blogging for a few days. I’ll be to shifting the internet action, to the extent action is necessary, to my Twitter feed.
For more cello — and if it’s mastery you’re after, rather than lugubrious process, mere proof of work — there’s this performance by Ha-Na Chang, or the amazing Anne Gastinel:
Adam Cathcart 