And I'm sure there are things I've left out, but you can tell that she is an extraordinarily talented person, and we're very fortunate to have her come and speak at Gresham tonight. So, Kate, come out and please don't trip over your own cello.

I had some photos taken recently. I was shifted about, asked to turn, move my head, fold my arms, smile, look serious. It was rather fun, thoroughly embarrassing, extremely awkward. And after a while, the photographer suggested I go and get my cello and see what images of playing might look like on the camera. And I protested. This wasn't a music photo shoot, it was for literary festivals. I didn't see myself primarily as a cellist anymore. That wasn't my identity. But in the face of his enthusiasm, I went and got my cello and sat in front of the blank screen, noodling around, playing a bit of Bach, improvising, and the photographer became much more animated and said, Yes, this is it, this is it, this is great. Because in that moment, observed the lens pointing at both my instrument and me, I began to understand something I'd perhaps only half suspected until then. And that was that away from my cello, my shadow is missing. Without it, I felt vulnerable and exposed, my silhouette incomplete. But with my instrument, I was protected, at ease, and somehow entirely happy in my own skin. Thinking about what a cello can mean is like contemplating one's relationship to a limb. It's essential, visible, but also intangible and unnoticed. Only its absence is a void, an audible silence, heard and felt by the player. A cello is never just itself, it's shaped to fit around a person. And a cellist is never fully themselves without their instrument. One predicates, needs the other. Alone, a cello or a cellist are either potential or loss. And so perhaps when player and instrument are separated, we can begin to see where one stops and the other begins. We can start to understand something of the complexity of meaning that an instrument might hold for its player. And so began a journey, a journey across Europe, a journey in and out of silence and music to uncover the stories of cellists and their instruments, some celebrated, others forgotten or destroyed. With my own cello as my travelling companion and my Bach Suites, I drew around me a community of players and cellos across time and place. Listening to their voices and getting to know their instruments, I wanted to learn what a cello might mean to a player and to find the stories that these objects, so closely representing our own bodies, might have to tell about the lives that were lived with and around them. My journey began as a very personal investigation, my own professional career having been severely limited by an arm injury. So thinking about the testimonies of other cellists and learning to look and listen differently to the cello, I hoped to understand the complicated nature of my own fractured relationship to my instrument. Now a cello is unusually bodily. It has, in the terminology that Lutiers use, a neck, shoulders, ribs, back, belly, and it is roughly the size of the torso of the person playing it. And in fact, cellists often talk about their instruments as if they are alive. I did a survey of the International Cello Society, and most players were very clear as to whether their cello was male or female. Lots of them had names, and others were as passionate about the fact that they definitely didn't have a gender, but either way, everybody had an opinion. Pablo Casals has said, I have played my cello more than half a century. He is my companion, and I love him. And he loves me, yes, he loves me, and he sounds well to make me happy. I posed the same question to Stephen Isilis: what is your cello to you? And he didn't hesitate. He said, My cello is my alter ego. I think it's male just because of the lowness of the voice. I know it's female and curvacious, but I don't like to think of my cello in erotic terms because I spend too much time with it between my legs. So it's my spiritual alter ego. What can we learn from the voice of a cello? We can deduce so much from the sound of a human voice. Think of Virginia Wolfe reading her own work, or those extraordinary recordings of Ezra Pound and this sort of fake Scottish sing-song voice, declaiming his. Something of the sound of a voice tells us so much about them and their relationship to their own words. In the case of a great cello, when its famous players have died, the voice remains. It doesn't age or sound dated, it doesn't give itself away with Wolfian clipped pronunciation. A cello sounds like a cello across hundreds of years. But the strings on any instrument of age, of course, aren't the original strings, they would have been gut. They'll be modern, much harsher now. And it's more than likely that the cello has long been separated from whatever bow its player and, of course, players would have used. If I play an old instrument, hoping to coax the voice of some past cellist into being, like the summoning up of a spirit, the pressure that I might use is not the way he or she would have drawn sound out of the instrument. My physical build is different from theirs. Can I hear the voice that they heard, or simply an echo of something they would have recognised resonating faintly under a modern, more alien sound? A cello can't be used as a medium, and playing is not a seance for communing with past masters. But there is some thread of connection to the past. We have to listen not to the note we play, but to the whisper under it, if we want the cello to give up its ghosts. This sense of wanting to hear those ghosts, those whispers, was the catalyst for my journey all around Europe. I first of all made my way to Italy to find one of the world's greatest cellos, known as the Christiani Stradivarius. This is the first of six little adventures or cellists that I was following in the footsteps of that I'll tell you about. The Christiani Stradivarius is almost all that remains of its player, Lise Christiani, who was a French cellist and the first ever female cello soloist, making her debut in the 1840s in Paris. And she's now almost entirely forgotten. Most cellists haven't heard of her. Her name appearing only in relation to her cello, the Christiani Stradvarius, and as the dedicate of one of Mendelssohn's songs without words, which you can see in the middle here. She took her strat on a monumental journey of exploration for years, right across the Russian steppes, dragging what is now one of the world's most valuable instruments through bogs and rivers, wrapped up in wolf furs and a lead case on a sledge, and sometimes on a mule. There's no record of why she undertook this epic journey. This is a picture imagined as part of it that appeared in a Parisian magazine, Le Monde, at the time. But reading through the reviews of her European concerts, the hype and obsession with this woman cellist is extreme. All the reviews question whether or not she plays with her legs apart. And this is a bizarre fixation. Of course, all the reviewers are male. In every language across Europe, they are all obsessing about how she plays, whether she plays side saddle or whether her very carefully tailored, specially designed skirts are obscuring unknown horrors. Is it decorous or monstrous to see a woman grapple with such a large instrument? What and how should women play? She was setting the precedent for what a solo cellist might do, what they might sound like. Are you allowed to play low notes? Do you play fast and fierce? Which register do you use? Do you play in a mellifuous way? Gentle, melancholy pieces in a higher register. I believe that a large part of the incentive to take her cello to literally uncharted territory across Siberia was to escape some of this gender obsession of the West. Because what does a woman playing a cello look like to members of the Buriat tribe in their tents in which she's playing, who have never actually seen a Western classical instrument? They will have totally different preconceptions of her gender, and I think for her there must have been something extraordinarily freeing about that. At one point, both Lise and her Stradvarius were nearly lost as the ship she was travelling on to reach one of the furthest points of Siberia nearly capsized. Apparently, she'd been playing her cello on deck, and some passing whales had been attracted to the sound, allegedly, and started butting the hull of the ship, nearly turning it. But Lise and the Strad survived the sea voyage. However, she never managed to return to Paris because after over a year, well over a year, of travelling through war-torn regions and through areas that were barely mapped, she was worn out, ill, and had run out of money, and she succumbed to cholera. Within a day of catching it, she died. And her body is lost somewhere in the Kamchatka region. But her Stradivarius, somehow or other, was rescued by the French ambassador and returned to Paris. It is now, as I say, possibly one of the most valuable instruments in the world, and is the only real remaining trace of her exploits. And it was the reason why I made my way to Cremona one winter morning, to the Museum of Violins. And here you can see on the right some of Stradivari's own paper moulds for his instruments, sort of bits and pieces of instruments, cellos by numbers, really. And right at the heart of this museum is the treasure trove, as it's known. It's the room where the most valuable instruments in the world are kept. The room's covered in red velvet, as you can see, dimly lit. It's a kind of womb-like mausoleum with violins and cellos hanging like fetuses in jars of liquid in the gloom. And it's made all the more eerie because they play a kind of cacophony of string instruments, a bit like listening to an orchestra tuning up permanently. And right at the centre, you can see here, hangs the Christiani Stradivari. And although we're surrounded, almost overwhelmed by this weird, eerie, overwhelming noise, at the very heart of it is silence. And I brought the wonderful violin prodigy Min Kim with me to visit the treasure trove for the first time because I was very interested in her relationship to instruments and silence. She'd built her career since she was 21 around her own very beloved Stradvarius violin. And then it was stolen at Houston Station. And when after two torturous years it was finally recovered, she was unable to buy it back from the insurers. She held it once, like giving up a child's, and has not seen it since. And her voice, locked in that violin, is now somewhere in a bank vault. And, you know, it isn't a human bereavement, but it is a bereavement that she experiences with deep grief. It's a part of her she will never hear again. And so when we went to visit the Christiani Stradivari, and we walked together into this hall of silenced instruments, as inaccessible as her own incarcerated violin, she went straight to these glass cases and put her ear to them. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained she was trying to hear them. She was trying to hear them whisper to her, to catch a flicker of a heartbeat, the feel of breath, or the glimmer of a voice that lay dormant in each instrument. These silenced instruments raise questions for me and certainly for Min as to what an instrument's purpose is. Is it to make sound? Or is it a work of art? Are they tools of our trade, or are they pieces of delicate cabinetry that have to be preserved for posterity? And what can I deduce from the silence of the Christiani cello? As I was, in fact, allowed eventually, after an awful lot of paperwork, to play the Christiani. And what I found when I was close to it was that there are scars on its body, there are cracks down the bodywork of the cello, which were made by severe temperature changes. And for me, whether or not the sound that I could make on it is Christiani's sound, I know that I'm holding a body that bears the marks of those adventures. And her body, as I say, we we don't know where she was buried if she was. So something of her remains. And interestingly, having read 50 or 60 reviews of her playing and specifically of her programme choices and the kind of sound that she made on this cello, I realised that something remains of her in the Mendelssohn. So Mendelssohn heard her play and wrote this song without words for her. And what I only realized after reading these reviews, and I don't know if anybody else has ever really had the opportunity to realize it as well, is that what he's done is write her sound into his piece. He's captured everything that they say about her. She plays in this sort of fluid lyrical, melancholy way. She uses harmonics, she uses the upper two strings of the cello. It's never sort of fast and furious, it's very gentle, very song-like. So I will give you a little bit of the song without words just to give you a flavor of the nearest thing I can to Lise Christiani's voice. And in Trieste, I met the violinist Renato Zanetovic, who was a hundred at the time that I met him. He's the surviving member of the once great Trieste piano trio. Renato was too frail to talk. In fact, we could sing a little together, but he couldn't really talk to me. But his son told me all about the trio's cellist, Amadeo Baldovino, who played again another wonderful Stradivarius, the Mara Stradivarius, with its varnish, famously the colour of sunlight. It's a beautiful kind of deep amber. And the members of the Trieste Piano Trio grew up in Trieste during the Second World War as teenagers. They were famous very, very young. But Trieste was occupied by the Nazis, and it was an absolutely brutal environment to grow up in. And Renato's son says that they survived mentally and physically by living in a world of music, music with a capital M, he said his father used to call it. Only thinking about music, living to perform, performing for the Gestapo if they had to, whatever it took to stay alive while people were being taken off into the hills, into the foiba, the holes in the hillsides and disappearing. Now, on the 10th of July 1963, during a South American tour when the trio's fame was at its height, they were trying to get between concerts between Montevideo and Buenos Aires when there was deep fog and all the flights were grounded. Now, these guys were pretty determined. They'd already lived through a lot, and the sea was second nature to them because Trieste is right on the water. And they were determined to get to their next concert. So, against all advice, they decided that they would uh try and travel on the only ship whose captain in Renato's words was mad enough to set sail. And he was there capering around on deck, apparently going, all aboard, all aboard, we set sail. Absolute thick fog everywhere, nobody could see anything. But they they boarded the Ciudad d'Assuncion, and as you can see, it doesn't end well. And in the middle of the night, this is 250 kilometres across the river Plate, which is famous for shipwrecks, and it's very shallow, and there are there are hulks of shipwrecks all the way along, so you have to choose a path very carefully. And the captain was prepared to try and do that. The trio took a turn around the deck and then settled in their cabins for the evening. And Amadeo Baldavino, the cellist, put the wonderful Mara Stradivari on the other bed of his cabin, went to sleep, and woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of nothing because the engines had stopped. And then he realized that he could hear shouting salvavidas, salvavidas, life jackets, and then people screaming. So, of course, the first thing he grabbed was the cello, straight up onto deck, and found the other two members of the trio, and realized that everyone was jumping for the lifeboats, pushing each other out of the way in their struggle to get to them, and that there was smoke as well as fog, and there was an orange glow, and the ship was on fire, and also listing severely. Amazingly, he remembered that on his turn around the deck that evening, he'd seen sort of sort of canisters, a bit like oil drums, that were kind of life rafts you could hold on to, because the mechanisms for the lifeboats weren't working, and the only lifeboat that was had been overfilled and had capsized at the point it had reached the water. So he, the pianist and Renato the violinist, jumped from the burning deck into the fog with the Stradivarius cello and this life raft. And they clung on. In fact, the pianist was then lost and only found a day later, thank goodness. But Renato the violinist and Amadeo the cellist clung on in the water all night holding on to this drum-like affair, talking apparently only about music. His son swears they only talked about their next concert. They discussed fingering and bowing patterns and what speed they might start the second movement and how they were going to phrase different parts of it. And absolutely music with a capital M, as he had said, living in this world of music, with no question as to whether they were actually going to survive the night. There were many, many casualties from this. So I think 55 drowned. And they were surrounded by burning flotsam and jets and people trying to hold on. And then finally, when a ship did catch them in the searchlight and managed to haul them on board, only after a bottle of brandy and some new clothes did Baldavino realize that he'd let go of the Mara and he hadn't seen it since the night before. They were taken to shore, put into a hotel, and then a day later he received a call to say that divers looking for bodies had found a floating cello case with Hill's sons written on it, the famous cello makers here in London. And he refused to believe it. There's no way this cello has survived this shipwreck for this long in the water. Renato's Guaneri violin was completely destroyed. There was absolutely no chance. But he was taken to the naval base to be reunited with the cello, and there were all media from all over the world there, cameras were flashing, microphones were being pushed in front of him, and he opened the case and gasped because this is what it looked like. It was sudden fragments of black wood, matchstick size, some of them missing, in fact. But then in fact, this box here is the cello being taken back on the plane, being taken back to London. But amazingly, after a year of extraordinarily painstaking resurrection and work, W.E. Hill and Sons managed to reconstruct the Mara Strodavari with bits splintered in here and there, managed to find little patches of varnish that weren't destroyed and spread it across the cello. And it when Baldavino was given it again after about a year and a half, he thought it actually sounded better than ever. And it's now being played by Christian Poltera, fantastic Swiss cellist, and it is still one of the top cellos in the world. But no one has really remembered its story because the repairs are so brilliant that you actually can't see the cracks at all. So, in a sense, it showed me that an instrument can be this broken, this destroyed, but still somehow retains something of its identity and voice. Now my third story is Anita Lasker Valfish, who I'm sure many of you know or have heard about. She is now 101 and living in North London and is the most extraordinary woman and also was a fantastic cellist. Now Anita was Jewish, she grew up in Breslau, which is now Rochwaff in Poland. And her family tried to get out in time when the Nazis took over and failed to be able to leave the country just at the last minute. So Anita was trapped, her parents were taken, she was taken to an orphanage, made to work in a factory, and tried to escape. And unfortunately, her escape, the failure of escape, meant that she was arrested by the Gestapo. And she was kept in solitary confinement for a year in a prison in Breslau before being transferred to Auschwitz. So her cello, her beloved Ventipani cello, was left behind, possibly in the safekeeping of a Luthier, we're not sure, in Breslau. And she was separated from it for a year and then taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. And when she arrived at the camp, knowing exactly what happened there, she was under no illusions from the prison, people had told her. She found herself telling the girl who was tattooing the number on her arm that she was a cellist. And to this day, she has no idea why she thought that detail was significant at that extraordinarily awful moment. But the girl then said, Well, thank God, you're saved. There's an orchestra here of all things, and it needs a bass line. The cellist of the orchestra is dead, and there's a cello. So rather than whatever horrendous fate was in store for her, Anita was taken to Hut 10, the orchestra hut, and auditioned for Alma Rose, who was the most extraordinary woman, the niece of Marler, a brilliant Viennese violinist herself, and the formidable director of this orchestra, who were a very motley assortment of girls with accordions and guitars and goodness knows what, some of whom barely able to play them. But she knew that as long as there was an orchestra and as long as they were pleasing the guards, they would stay alive. Anita played the slow movement of a Bokerini cello concerto. Alma was obviously impressed, as you would be. And that was Anita's ticket to survival through Auschwitz. When Alma died, however, the girl's protection was gone. And the Jewish players were asked to line up on one side and the others on the other, and they were absolutely convinced that they were going to be taken to the gas chambers. But in fact, they were put on a truck and taken to Bergen-Belsen. So at that point, again, Anita's second cello was lost. And at Belsen, she almost died of disease, starvation, and just about remembers being able to hear the loudspeakers saying that the camp had been liberated. And when she was capable of understanding it and well enough to be able to stand, she started thinking about a cello once more. And there are the most wonderfully poignant letters to her sister in England, where she can't even write the word cello. She spells it out because it's too sacred. C-E-L-L-O. I'm hoping that the guards might be able to get me, well, not the guards, the liberating troops might be able to get me a C-E-L-L-O. And they did, they found a terrible one on top of a cupboard somewhere in the town eventually. And when she had the muscle strength and the tone to be able to play, she played for the other survivors of the camp. She then went on when she could get to Britain to have a wonderfully distinguished career and was one of the founder members of the English Chamber Orchestra. But it's fascinating to think about what music means in that context. For her, it was a lifeline, for her, it's been her life. But for many of the other prisoners, and for many in the orchestra, it was one of the worst sorts of torment, something very beautiful being used as part of the Nazi machine. They were forced to play as the other prisoners were marched out and marched back at the end of the day. It was so horribly inappropriate. And there were moments where she was made to play Schumann for the horrific Dr. Mengeley, this ghastly pseudo-doctor who did the completely horrific experiments. So music in the worst possible, possible possible circumstances, being abused. And yet she still says, Well, music was above all that. Thank goodness they couldn't take culture, they couldn't take music from me. And she's not at all sentimental and she won't go into it. And I think that's part of her survival strategy. But she did say to me, you know, there's a reason why I made everyone in my family learn the cello. And I I asked her about the cello, her ventapane cello that she was left behind in Breslau. Would she like to see it? Because I could possibly trace it. And I was very reluctant even to ask her. And she thought about it for a bit, and then she said, That was then, this is now. I wouldn't even recognise it if I saw it. And that was that. And it really summed up the experience of working with her. That it was a it was as if I were being led down a corridor of locked doors, and it was my privilege to be there with her, hearing her stories, hearing her reminisce, but I was not to touch any of those doors. And and that is the narrative that she has of this extraordinary time. Um so yeah, a privilege to work with Anita. And that takes me to my second story of uh extraordinary Jewish cellist, the cellist and composer Paul Herrmann, who was a Hungarian cellist. He was regarded in when he was in his very early 20s as the next Pablo Cassals. He would have been a household name if he'd survived the Second World War. But he was Jewish and he was in Berlin in the 30s. So he was hounded across Europe. He eventually went into hiding in Toulouse, leaving behind his little daughter Corrie, who was seven when she last saw him. And eventually in Toulouse, he was rounded up, I think, in a street arrest, and taken to Drancy concentration camp on the edge of internment camp on the edge of Paris. And when he was taken, his flat was sealed with the contents inside, which is what was standard procedure. But inside that flat was the most extraordinary cello. It was the only thing he owned, really. It was made by the Neapolitan maker Niccolo Galliano, and it was a beautiful, beautiful instrument. And somehow, we're still not sure how, he managed to get a slip of paper, a letter, out of the cattle truck as he was taken away, perhaps just throwing it onto the tracks, we're not sure, to tell relatives that he'd been taken, but that his cello was in his apartment. And somehow or other, his relatives, a hundred or so kilometres away, got that letter. And his cousin cycled under curfew with a rubbish student cello that wasn't worth anything, got to his flat, again, potentially would have been shot if he'd been caught, climbed in through a back window with the student cello, swapped the Galeano for that cello, squeezed it through the window, and cycled off into the night. It was an extraordinary thing to do. And then Pell was taken from Drancy to Kaunas, um, to Fort 9, horribly known as the Fort of Death, where he was indeed killed. Um this it was taken in the cell in which he was held. This is the wall, um, and behind it, this is the cell wall that's in which these men from Convoy 73 from Drancy were held the night before they were taken out and shot. And it was whitewashed, but because it's so damp, there's water streaming down these walls, the whitewash has come off, and here's the graffiti behind it. Sort of May 1944. Nous sommes nous sont Francais, we are 900 Frenchmen. The Emile has written his name there. Um, they just wanted to make a mark, they wanted to people to know that they were there. And so the director of what is now a memorial museum here wanted me to play some Hermann. He wanted me to sort of disturb the air in there somehow, to have Hermann, Herman's voice represented because so many were annihilated in this horrendous spot. So um I'll play you a little bit of some of Hermann's music to give you a sense of this vibrant Hungarian voice of his. And there is now a recording of Herman's concerto playing on a loop in this cell for people to hear. It's a concerto that was found in a drawer in his daughter's house and Corrie's house, and recently reconstructed, and given its sort of modern days premiere. Now, the cello remained with the family until 1952, and then it was sold, we think. It was very, very hard to track this whole process, and then it disappeared in the 60s. And so I was almost obsessively desperate to find this cello, to somehow give it back to Corrie Herrman, who is in her late 90s now and became a dear friend in this process. We tramped all over Paris together and Rotterdam and all sorts of places, um, following the footsteps of her father. And I wanted to know what it would be for her to hear its voice again, because she, you know, her father touched this cello more than he touched her. He spent longer with it than he spent with her, and she only ever remembered him with the cello and its sound. So, what would it be to be able to give that back to her? And I knew that the cello of this distinction must, if it has survived, would be findable somehow, but I couldn't find any clues as to where it had been sold, where it was now. Eventually, through incredibly convoluted means, I managed to find that it had writing on its ribs, which is most unusual. And then through even more convoluted means, I managed to find out what the writing said, which was ego anima musica sum, I am the soul of music, which was extremely poignant and powerful for me. And I had, after a few years of looking for this cello, to admit defeat when I really did have to get on and publish the book. Um, I hadn't found it. And so I ended the book with this idea being the soul of music. But then a week before the book launch, which was a Wigmore Hall performance, uh, the the wonderful Chinese cellist Jan Wang in Shanghai read the book, and he thought from the detailed descriptions in it of the cello and the photographs of Pal Hermann playing it, that he thought he might have seen it. And at that point, I'd had about 20 people thinking they'd identified it. So I thought, okay, yeah, possibly, but you know. Um and he said there's this young chap in Germany, Sam Lucas, an Australian cellist, who was in the Queen Elizabeth cello competition and Jun Wang had been one of the judges, and he remembered seeing Sam playing a Galliano with writing around it, which is a lot closer than anyone else had got. So he sent me photos of Sam, and I looked at the photos that I'd published in my book, and the writing was the same. It was Paul Herrmann's cello. And so, about four days before our Wigmore Hall performance here with Natalie Klein, I phoned up Sam, cold calling him, standing on the strand with lots of noise, saying, Hello, you don't know me, but would you please fly over here immediately and learn this ferociously difficult concerto you've definitely never heard of? And would you also mind playing it on the Today programme and then playing it at the Wigmore Hall with Natalie? And um and Sam, to his enormous credit, said, Yeah, okay, that sounds great. Um, so he did. And uh, and so for the first time in about 85 years, Corrie on the Today programme heard Sam having just flown in, and then she saw the cello at the Wigmore Hall, which was the stage in which her father had played before, you know, decades and decades before, and heard Sam play the cello again, and just the the smile of recognition when she first heard the sound of that cello was so extraordinary. And for me, it meant that you know, I I can't cure cancer, I can't do something useful, I do music and I do words, and what good's that? But but for a moment, I could change history in just a very small way. I could change her sense of her own story, I could change her ending of her relationship to her father. And then the story got bigger and bigger, and the the president of the European Parliament heard about it and invited us to come and um have the cello right at the centre of the hemisphere in Brussels, the Parliament building, as the focal point for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. And lovely Corrie, who you see here, um who's almost the same height as the cello, she's tiny weeny, stood right in the middle with all these parliamentarians around her and all the Reuters cameras everywhere, and told her story, and told the story of our search for the cello, and told everyone about her father, and got a standing ovation, and it was extraordinary. The other chap here is her son, also called Pal, who looks remarkably like his grandfather, in fact. And since then, there have been concerts all over the world in the concertgebau, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Snape Maltings, in St. John's Smith Square. There have been premieres, there have been a new string quartet that we've found that's also been premiered. And as I say, that I can see see what this has meant for Corrie. And her son Pal says she's she's different. Something about her has changed, something about the trauma of her early years has been laid to rest. Not everything, and it isn't a restitution, it isn't resurrection, but it is being able to use an object, use a story to be able to set something to rest for her, in a sense, and that to me is the most enormous privilege. Now, this cello is something completely different. This is known as the bee cello, and it belongs to a wonderful physicist called Professor Martin Bensick, who is at Nottingham Trent University. He's a world expert in the behaviour of honey bees, and his wife is a cellist. And when she realized that there was a broken cello that was about to be thrown out, she rescued it and they decided it would make a fantastic beehive because Martin firmly believes that bees are infinitely superior to humans and that a cello is the zenith of human achievement. So therefore, it would be a shocking sacrifice to give the cello to bees. And so he has. And it stands in the middle of an orchard in um just outside Nottingham. The F-holes have become the bees' front doors, and they fly out of them very easily, but it's quite hard to navigate back in, so very often they land and pluck the strings by mistake. So there's this wonderful duet all the time between cello and bees, the sort of plinking, plunking, twanging noise. And inside the resonating cavity is thick and solid with honeycomb and bees. I've never seen a cello so darkly full. And the bees behave differently, having this cello as their home. Martin's noticed that not only have they have they actually changed the design of the cello, they've improved on Stradivarius's design. They've resined the bridge onto the front of the cello. It's freestanding. They've resined the soundpost. I mean, when a soundpost collapses, it sounds like a pistol shot. Why take the risk? Stick it on. That's what they've done. They've also joined the F-holes up. They haven't managed it by this picture, but later, the little tiny gaps in the F holes, they've resined closed. It's perhaps it's a waste of hot air going out. Who knows? Perhaps they just like the design. And they sit on the front, stroking the front backwards and forwards with their mandibles. And no one's ever seen bees do this before, apparently. And Martin doesn't know why, but he wonders whether it's perhaps because they see themselves reflected in the varnish, whether perhaps the cello has given the bees back to themselves for the first time. And they're somehow honouring their own reflections. So I played them some Bach, the top of my arm, um, to see how they would react. And I didn't know whether they would swarm, which they do, um whether they would be silent, who knows what bees think of Bach. Um, but I thought it appropriate to give them something that didn't need an accompaniment, so it was a holistic musical experience for them. And um, and as it turned out, if you put an accelerometer onto the bridge, there's a little microphone, and listen with headphones, the general humming does lower because bees are listening through their legs. And so the movement did still, only just perceptibly. And then they then the movement started again as if they were just sort of, you know, yeah, that was all right, you know, back to the back to their business. Um, but one of the other things we noticed when we put the accelerometer onto the bridge was that in its quite new location in the orchard, the wind is moving through the strings all the time, as well as the bees plunking the strings themselves. There is this extraordinary spectral duet between wind and cellos and the humming of the bees and their rhythms and them hitting the strings, which we managed to capture a little bit of, so I'll see if I can play that. The encounter altered my sense of ownership over our instruments, even my sense of what a cello might mean. The B cello is simultaneously instrument, architecture, scientific experiment, and home. And it made me rethink what it means for a cello to have a voice. This cello's voice has nothing to do with human intervention. In fact, my Bach felt almost impertinent. And this cello's music is not music that's meant for human ears. I felt like I was eavesdropping, and there was something rather lovely about that. Now, my final cello to tell you about, we've called the Open String Cello. It's the name of a charity project now. And this cello brings us from preservation and recovery towards making something completely new. With the wonderful luthier Robert Brewer Young, who is one of the directors of WE Hill and Sons, the same firm that reconstructed the Mara, I worked on a project where we took discarded fragments of old instruments, old bits of wood, derelict strings and pegs, and created something completely new. This is a totally new experimental hybrid cello, but drawn from Stradivarius' own drawings, sometimes of guitars, sometimes of chitarones, all sorts of other old instruments. So each new element of this cello has a precedent in old instruments. But what we created was, as you can see, round like a guitar. It doesn't have the sharp corners, it has a totally flat back, and it has a pyramid as a scroll instead of the curly snail. And the reason for that is that we wanted to be able to create an instrument that you can make in just a few weeks from Flatpak. And that, you know, there are plenty of terrible cellos around in the world. One of them is full of bees. But this one is conservatoire standard quality, and that hasn't been done before. Because Robert had been working with a wonderful youth orchestra called the Barrio Ludwigna Youth Orchestra in Argentina, in fact, very near where the Mara Stradivarius was shipwrecked. And they have an arrangement whereby children are taken in to a safer compound, an extremely dangerous, very, very poor area. And they're taught an instrument, and their families are fed and kept safe. And it's said there that having an instrument case on your shoulder is like having a bulletproof vest. It is your ticket to safety. And the players are fantastic, but they don't have decent instruments. So Robert and I were working on this project, the open string instrument project, to design violins, violets, cellos that the children could make themselves and then own. They will never change hands for money. And what I found fascinating about this is that the way I made this first prototype because the whole idea was someone who has no skill whatsoever needs to be able to do this. So I was a perfect candidate. And it made me understand my instrument differently. I understood it from the inside out, literally there, chiseling it with this Neanderthal-like tool to the absolute precise millimeter. If you stick it through the back, you've ruined the whole back of the cello. Planing it, and you're used to my arms moving in a certain pattern across the body of a cello, but with a plane, it judders. It's like becoming illiterate. It's very interesting. The ribs are much thinner than I expected. So I learnt the cello again from the inside out. And this cello, Robert, inscribed this poem on, which is by Ursula Vaughan Williams, which is about how the cellist is a cellist and cello are a composite being, like a centaur, both man and instrument being the same. And what I love particularly about this project and why I wanted to end with it is because the cellos that I've told you about have their own stories, they have a history. Hermann's cello is separated from its story as if it had amnesia and we've restored it. We don't know where Anita's cellos are, but we know she survived because of the cello. This cello waits to have its biography imprinted on it. It will go on to have a life with other young players who need it, and other cellos will be created as a result. So I want to perhaps return to Pal Hermann's inscription, Ego anime musique sum, I am the soul of music. Because a cello cannot preserve a person intact, but it can carry something of them onwards: a name, a touch, a scar, marks, cracks, a story, and the possibility, both for me as a cellist, finding my way back to falling in love with my instrument again, and for hopefully these young players, a way of being heard. Thank you very much.