David Ledbetter reviews and discusses George Kennaway\u27s 2010 work.
Kennaway, George. Playing the Cello, 1780-1930. Farhham: Ashgate, 2010.
ISBN: 9781409438335 (hbk); 9781409438342 (PDF); 9781472400338 (ePUB)

Ledbetter, David

English

Scholarship@Claremont

Performance Practice ReviewVolume 20 | Number 1 Article 3"Playing the Cello, 1780-1930" by GeorgeKennawayDavid LedbetterFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pprThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted forinclusion in Performance Practice Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contactscholarship@cuc.claremont.edu.Ledbetter, David (2015) ""Playing the Cello, 1780-1930" by George Kennaway," Performance Practice Review: Vol. 20: No. 1, Article 3.DOI: 10.5642/perfpr.201520.01.03Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3 Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)   |   ISSN: 2166-8205   |   http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr  © 2015 David Ledbetter. This article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).  Book Review: Kennaway, George.  Playing the Cello, 1780-1930. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.  ISBN: 9781409438335 (hbk); 9781409438342 (PDF); 9781472400338 (ePUB).  David Ledbetter   Approaches to the history of performance in what one might call the very long nineteenth century are many-faceted. Instructive methods and treatises are important, but much more re-vealing is the notation of repertory, as the fundamental work of Clive Brown and others has shown. Even more revealing, perhaps, are early recordings, particularly in the prevalence of rubato as an expressive resource, something not generally apparent from notation. This and the routine arpeggiation of piano chords, another aspect not otherwise evident, have been ex-plored by Neal Peres da Costa, and the whole field of early recording by the CHARM group.1 George Kennaway is a member of CHASE (Collection of Historical Annotated String Edi-tions, centered in the University of Leeds).2 The fruits of the study of instructive editions are rich, and it has been sad to see conservatoire libraries jettisoning “out-of-date editions” at the very moment when they were becoming primary research materials. Kennaway’s book is path-breaking in that it is the first to deal exclusively with the cello for the specified period. He aims to provide a comprehensive survey of a field that has been only patchily covered until now. Articles in Grove online are still based on sometimes erro-neous information from Wasielewski (1888) and Van der Straeten (1914). It is also path-breaking in its scope. Unlike Valerie Walden, Kennaway takes in not only a full range of methods and treatises and the notation of case studies, with discussion of early recordings, but also cultural context in the form of contemporary criticism both professional and amateur, literary references to the cello.3 He ends with more than a nod in the direction of gender stereotypes, gesture, and the body. All this requires sensitive and knowledgeable assessment (who do concert reviews tell us about, the describer or the described?). As a musicologist as well as a professional cellist, Kennaway is well placed to provide it. As the title declares, the focus of the book is on playing the cello rather than exclusively on specifics of performing style. Accordingly, three initial chapters deal with fundamentals of posture, bow-hold, and left- and right-hand actions. Kennaway is particularly concerned to                                                 1 Neal Peres da Costa, Off the Record (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Centre for the His-tory and Analysis of Recorded Music, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html. A collection of significant arti-cles dealing with performance is edited by David Milsom in Classical and Romantic Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).  2 http://chase.leeds.ac.uk/.  3 Valerie Walden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Prac-tice, 1740-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). David Ledbetter    http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3                                                                                                  2 reflect variety of practice and to put current preconceptions in context. As one might expect, the emphasis through most of the nineteenth century is on this variety, even within “schools.”  Illustrations must be treated with care. One, from Bréval’s Traité de violoncelle (1804), is plainly adjusted to give the player an appearance of Romantic Schwung. Adopting the some-times idiosyncratic attitudes of early nineteenth-century players, modern cellists could se-verely compromise tone production. It is a matter of trading advantages and disadvantages in terms of the chosen repertory, and there is certainly wide scope for open-minded experimen-tation. The general adoption of the tail-pin in the later nineteenth century, valued for sound projection as much as for convenience in higher positions, together with voluminous Victo-rian gowns, enabled women to come to the fore. The bass viol, let alone the cello, had long been considered “improper” for women, in which case the striking portrait by Jean-Marc Nattier of Madame Henriette de France, second daughter of Louis XV, playing the bass viol must have been shocking to some in the 1750s, while Hélène Dolmetsch c. 1895 dressed in “Elizabethan” costume playing a bass viol with a tail-pin looks merely absurd. There is evi-dence of women playing the cello in the earlier nineteenth century, but it is only in the last decades of the century that notable female virtuosos appear. The eighteenth-century violinistic bow-hold with slanted left hand was surprisingly durable. It was basic to the technique of the great player and pedagogue Bernhard Romberg. With all its disadvantages, it was still current in the 1930s and was even later being advocated by William Pleeth. Fingering is of cardinal importance for early keyboard music, but how se-riously should one take the variety of practices prevalent among cellists from 1780 to 1840? “Modern,” systematic fingering had been advocated by John Gunn in 1789, yet many players in the nineteenth century continued to use three-fingered scales. There is no room for pedan-tic “correctness” here; players were flexible and pragmatic and that is the most correct one can be. The move to the big sound towards the end of the nineteenth century is probably the feature that most divides us from previous practice. The priority of wrist and fingers gave way to arm and weight. The exceedingly frilly and sophisticated galant violin bowing tech-nique of Leclair, Geminiani, or Tartini developed further with nineteenth-century virtuosity, though cellists, other than Adrien-François Servais, seem not to have gone as far as violinists. The change to a heavier style exactly matched changes in singing technique and piano action.  Moving on to overtly expressive features, two chapters deal with the contentious matters of portamento and vibrato, contentious because here again there was a large variety of prac-tices, and it is difficult to know how much the instructions in treatises and editions reflect actual playing before the development of sound recording. Throughout the nineteenth cen-tury, many disparaged the overuse of portamento on the cello, not to be used as commonly as on the violin. Romberg was exceptional in the early nineteenth century for his relative enthu-siasm for it, perhaps because of his idiosyncratic violinistic left hand. Friedrich Dotzauer (1824) limited it to solo playing, disparaging its use in the orchestra. Here, as in other aspects, the opposite extreme was represented by the notorious Friedrich Grützmacher, whose editions of Bach and Mendelssohn represent the high watermark of personal, instructive editing. Grützmacher’s pupil Diran Alexanian, on the other hand, was much more restrained in por-tamento, a warning against making assumptions about teacher-pupil traditions. Towards the end of the century, cellists such as Josef Werner (1894) began prescribing ways of avoiding shifts, but it was the advent of sound recording that seems to have resulted in the drastic re-Book Review: Playing the Cello   Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)                                                                                                   3 duction of its use, as it did with rubato. All sorts of spontaneous freedoms in live performance can seem intolerably mannered when the tensions and atmosphere of the occasion are re-moved. Similarly with vibrato, nineteenth-century cello methods discuss it far less often than do those for violin. In this case, there is not only variety of usage among players but also a great variety of types, more even than in the old French viol technique, including Bebung, ondulé, bow-vibrato, Dotzauer’s Pochen, and with various speeds, all in the service of the expressive moment. It was generally associated with strong emotion rather than being an indispensable part of tone production, as Alfredo Piatti said: “we cannot always be in a passion.” There was also class distinction, associating its overuse and that of portamento with sentimental salon music and lower-class cello playing generally. Hugo Becker (1929) thought its erotic associ-ations quite out of place in serious classical music and even compared it to alcohol addiction. My own impression is that it was the continuous, rapid and thrilling vibrato of Jascha Heifetz in the 1930s that popularized its universal use, even in orchestral playing, where it can give a common, routine effect to the sound. In the later part of this period, the evidence of recordings is very different from the impression given by written records. All but two of the pre-1930 cello recordings in the Pearl collection use constant vibrato, some wider than others. There seems little correlation of players’ age or school with the amount or type of vibrato, and, by the 1930s, it had in any case become more uniform. At the same time, the frequency of portamento declined consid-erably in the 1930s and especially after World War II. Kennaway compares nine recordings of cello arrangements of Schumann’s Träumerei, in the process refining on the conceptions of some more superficial writers on twentieth-century performance. This is a particularly val-uable part of the book in that his view is of different artistic personalities and practices co-existing synchronically, rather than a grand diachronic narrative. Accordingly, in the case of Träumerei, it is the youngest player (Rosario Bourdon) who uses narrow vibrato at expressive highlights in the nineteenth-century way. The final chapters deal with social and cultural context, mainly the question of the “gendered identity” of the cello. Debates about gender in music generally go back to the 1980s, but, so far, they have not impinged on performance studies to an equivalent degree. Kennaway first examines perceptions of the cello as an instrument, then, in one of the most original and suggestive parts of the book, how perceived gender characteristics may work out in performance. At the beginning of the period, the cello was definitely a “manly” instrument, its character grave, earnest, sublime, not exciting the passions with the wild and violent movements of the violin. Throughout there was a question about its suitability for women, particularly in Britain. As late as the 1930s, the BBC Symphony Orchestra banned female cellists, prompting Ethyl Smyth to reflect that, in her lifetime, first it had been riding bicy-cles, then riding astride, and now the ban on the cello was “the drowning clinging to a spar” (188). Augustus John’s portrait of Madame Suggia must have had an influence. It may not have been a particularly close likeness, but that is not the point. What he was painting was her intense physical relationship with the instrument and the magnificently heroic effect. Havelock Ellis thought the cello the perfect instrument for women; there is much sub-text in descriptions of the gender characteristics of instruments. David Ledbetter    http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3                                                                                                  4 This all coheres into practical usefulness when it comes to the character and projection of musical ideas. Kennaway takes as case studies works of the Bohrer brothers, Romberg, and Lalo. The violinist Anton Bohrer’s string quartet was praised by Berlioz when they gave the first performances in Paris of Beethoven’s late quartets. The Duos Anton wrote with his cel-list brother Max in the 1820s and 30s are quite another matter. There is nothing of the ear-nest, cantabile nature of the cello, but a demonstration that the cello could match the virtuoso techniques of the violin in a circus act of transcendental execution. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the high priests of German classicism, and there is a broad range of inter-vening hues. Real insights come when this point of view is adopted for works of more sub-stance. Kennaway offers astute assessment of Romberg’s Concerto Op. 3 in D, then con-vincingly applies Vincent d’Indy’s (1909) gendering of themes to the first movement of the Lalo Concerto (1877) in order to see what possible performance implications there may be. D’Indy’s classifications have naturally provoked much comment, and they certainly tell us more about social and cultural attitudes of their time than about anything else, but they do belong in the same world as Lalo. Taking criteria developed in recent gender literature, Ken-naway shows features that might justify identifying D’Indy’s “seconde féminine.” He then examines the first recordings of the Concerto (by Suggia, Cassadó, Navarra, and Nelsova, with a look also at Jacqueline Dupré) to see if any of this is evident in performances. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in spite of the wildly different personalities of the players, there is little evi-dence of that sort of character contrast in any of the performances. Is there a whole dimension of character contrast, which could be explored with subtlety and depth, that we have been missing? It is difficult in a brief review to convey the sheer range of types of source and performance covered in this book, all with admirable openness and fair-mindedness. Where does it all lead in a world where professional musicians look for quick rules of thumb and follow-my-leader fashionability? The answer cannot be just, say, Brahms Symphonies with little vibrato, Urtext tempo, and self-conscious, clip-on portamentos. One view I would take issue with is that, in the case of Baroque music, “authenticity” in the 1980s stood for the elimination of personal interpretation in performance and that the performance of Baroque repertoires has since then become more experimental. This was not the experience of Bruce Haynes, a leading contributor throughout that period, who vividly demonstrated with sound clips that the 1970s and 80s were a period of startling progress in flexibility and nuance, pro-gress that has since been rowed back from in what Haynes calls “strait” performance (as in straitjacket).4 This is not to say that there are no groups doing remarkable things now. The case of Baroque music is misleading in that the instruments are so different from modern ones, and themselves suggest, not to say dictate, performing style. The craft of music and the nature of musical expression differed as well. There was surely a watershed around 1800 when music moved on to a much more personally emotional plane and the nature of musical projection changed. The twentieth century then brought its own overlay. Listening now to, say, the Hungarian Quartet’s highly regarded Beethoven recordings of the 1950s, one is struck by the technical solidity but also by the sameness of high-powered sound through vastly different moods, except for the one moment in Op.132 where the vibrato is switched                                                 4 Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), with associated website. Book Review: Playing the Cello   Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)                                                                                                   5 off. We have come a long way since then, but not as far as some would have us believe.5 Kennaway has provided a superb resource for talented and curious cellists who seek to de-velop their own imaginative response to the music of the long nineteenth century.                                                 5 See for example Clive Brown, “Performing 19th-Century Chamber Music: The Yawning Chasm Be-tween Contemporary Practice and Historical Evidence,” Early Music 38 (2010): 476-80. 

Playing the Cello, 1780-1930  by George Kennaway

Keck Graduate Institute

Performance Practice Review
Volume 20 | Number 1 Article 3
"Playing the Cello, 1780-1930" by George
Kennaway
David Ledbetter
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for
inclusion in Performance Practice Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact
scholarship@cuc.claremont.edu.
Ledbetter, David (2015) ""Playing the Cello, 1780-1930" by George Kennaway," Performance Practice Review: Vol. 20: No. 1, Article 3.
DOI: 10.5642/perfpr.201520.01.03
Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3
 Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)   |   ISSN: 2166-8205   |   http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr 
 
© 2015 David Ledbetter. This article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 
 
Book Review: Kennaway, George.  Playing the Cello, 1780-
1930. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.  ISBN: 9781409438335 
(hbk); 9781409438342 (PDF); 9781472400338 (ePUB). 
 
David Ledbetter 
 
 
Approaches to the history of performance in what one might call the very long nineteenth 
century are many-faceted. Instructive methods and treatises are important, but much more re-
vealing is the notation of repertory, as the fundamental work of Clive Brown and others has 
shown. Even more revealing, perhaps, are early recordings, particularly in the prevalence of 
rubato as an expressive resource, something not generally apparent from notation. This and 
the routine arpeggiation of piano chords, another aspect not otherwise evident, have been ex-
plored by Neal Peres da Costa, and the whole field of early recording by the CHARM group.1 
George Kennaway is a member of CHASE (Collection of Historical Annotated String Edi-
tions, centered in the University of Leeds).2 The fruits of the study of instructive editions are 
rich, and it has been sad to see conservatoire libraries jettisoning “out-of-date editions” at the 
very moment when they were becoming primary research materials. 
Kennaway’s book is path-breaking in that it is the first to deal exclusively with the cello 
for the specified period. He aims to provide a comprehensive survey of a field that has been 
only patchily covered until now. Articles in Grove online are still based on sometimes erro-
neous information from Wasielewski (1888) and Van der Straeten (1914). It is also path-
breaking in its scope. Unlike Valerie Walden, Kennaway takes in not only a full range of 
methods and treatises and the notation of case studies, with discussion of early recordings, 
but also cultural context in the form of contemporary criticism both professional and amateur, 
literary references to the cello.3 He ends with more than a nod in the direction of gender 
stereotypes, gesture, and the body. All this requires sensitive and knowledgeable assessment 
(who do concert reviews tell us about, the describer or the described?). As a musicologist as 
well as a professional cellist, Kennaway is well placed to provide it. 
As the title declares, the focus of the book is on playing the cello rather than exclusively 
on specifics of performing style. Accordingly, three initial chapters deal with fundamentals of 
posture, bow-hold, and left- and right-hand actions. Kennaway is particularly concerned to 
                                                
1 Neal Peres da Costa, Off the Record (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Centre for the His-
tory and Analysis of Recorded Music, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html. A collection of significant arti-
cles dealing with performance is edited by David Milsom in Classical and Romantic Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 
2011). 
 
2 http://chase.leeds.ac.uk/. 
 
3 Valerie Walden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Prac-
tice, 1740-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 
David Ledbetter 
 
 
 
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3                                                                                                  2 
reflect variety of practice and to put current preconceptions in context. As one might expect, 
the emphasis through most of the nineteenth century is on this variety, even within “schools.”  
Illustrations must be treated with care. One, from Bréval’s Traité de violoncelle (1804), is 
plainly adjusted to give the player an appearance of Romantic Schwung. Adopting the some-
times idiosyncratic attitudes of early nineteenth-century players, modern cellists could se-
verely compromise tone production. It is a matter of trading advantages and disadvantages in 
terms of the chosen repertory, and there is certainly wide scope for open-minded experimen-
tation. The general adoption of the tail-pin in the later nineteenth century, valued for sound 
projection as much as for convenience in higher positions, together with voluminous Victo-
rian gowns, enabled women to come to the fore. The bass viol, let alone the cello, had long 
been considered “improper” for women, in which case the striking portrait by Jean-Marc 
Nattier of Madame Henriette de France, second daughter of Louis XV, playing the bass viol 
must have been shocking to some in the 1750s, while Hélène Dolmetsch c. 1895 dressed in 
“Elizabethan” costume playing a bass viol with a tail-pin looks merely absurd. There is evi-
dence of women playing the cello in the earlier nineteenth century, but it is only in the last 
decades of the century that notable female virtuosos appear. 
The eighteenth-century violinistic bow-hold with slanted left hand was surprisingly 
durable. It was basic to the technique of the great player and pedagogue Bernhard Romberg. 
With all its disadvantages, it was still current in the 1930s and was even later being advocated 
by William Pleeth. Fingering is of cardinal importance for early keyboard music, but how se-
riously should one take the variety of practices prevalent among cellists from 1780 to 1840? 
“Modern,” systematic fingering had been advocated by John Gunn in 1789, yet many players 
in the nineteenth century continued to use three-fingered scales. There is no room for pedan-
tic “correctness” here; players were flexible and pragmatic and that is the most correct one 
can be. The move to the big sound towards the end of the nineteenth century is probably the 
feature that most divides us from previous practice. The priority of wrist and fingers gave 
way to arm and weight. The exceedingly frilly and sophisticated galant violin bowing tech-
nique of Leclair, Geminiani, or Tartini developed further with nineteenth-century virtuosity, 
though cellists, other than Adrien-François Servais, seem not to have gone as far as violinists. 
The change to a heavier style exactly matched changes in singing technique and piano action. 
 Moving on to overtly expressive features, two chapters deal with the contentious matters 
of portamento and vibrato, contentious because here again there was a large variety of prac-
tices, and it is difficult to know how much the instructions in treatises and editions reflect 
actual playing before the development of sound recording. Throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, many disparaged the overuse of portamento on the cello, not to be used as commonly as 
on the violin. Romberg was exceptional in the early nineteenth century for his relative enthu-
siasm for it, perhaps because of his idiosyncratic violinistic left hand. Friedrich Dotzauer 
(1824) limited it to solo playing, disparaging its use in the orchestra. Here, as in other aspects, 
the opposite extreme was represented by the notorious Friedrich Grützmacher, whose editions 
of Bach and Mendelssohn represent the high watermark of personal, instructive editing. 
Grützmacher’s pupil Diran Alexanian, on the other hand, was much more restrained in por-
tamento, a warning against making assumptions about teacher-pupil traditions. Towards the 
end of the century, cellists such as Josef Werner (1894) began prescribing ways of avoiding 
shifts, but it was the advent of sound recording that seems to have resulted in the drastic re-
Book Review: Playing the Cello 
 
 
Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)                                                                                                   3 
duction of its use, as it did with rubato. All sorts of spontaneous freedoms in live performance 
can seem intolerably mannered when the tensions and atmosphere of the occasion are re-
moved. 
Similarly with vibrato, nineteenth-century cello methods discuss it far less often than do 
those for violin. In this case, there is not only variety of usage among players but also a great 
variety of types, more even than in the old French viol technique, including Bebung, ondulé, 
bow-vibrato, Dotzauer’s Pochen, and with various speeds, all in the service of the expressive 
moment. It was generally associated with strong emotion rather than being an indispensable 
part of tone production, as Alfredo Piatti said: “we cannot always be in a passion.” There was 
also class distinction, associating its overuse and that of portamento with sentimental salon 
music and lower-class cello playing generally. Hugo Becker (1929) thought its erotic associ-
ations quite out of place in serious classical music and even compared it to alcohol addiction. 
My own impression is that it was the continuous, rapid and thrilling vibrato of Jascha Heifetz 
in the 1930s that popularized its universal use, even in orchestral playing, where it can give a 
common, routine effect to the sound. 
In the later part of this period, the evidence of recordings is very different from the 
impression given by written records. All but two of the pre-1930 cello recordings in the Pearl 
collection use constant vibrato, some wider than others. There seems little correlation of 
players’ age or school with the amount or type of vibrato, and, by the 1930s, it had in any 
case become more uniform. At the same time, the frequency of portamento declined consid-
erably in the 1930s and especially after World War II. Kennaway compares nine recordings 
of cello arrangements of Schumann’s Träumerei, in the process refining on the conceptions 
of some more superficial writers on twentieth-century performance. This is a particularly val-
uable part of the book in that his view is of different artistic personalities and practices co-
existing synchronically, rather than a grand diachronic narrative. Accordingly, in the case of 
Träumerei, it is the youngest player (Rosario Bourdon) who uses narrow vibrato at expressive 
highlights in the nineteenth-century way. 
The final chapters deal with social and cultural context, mainly the question of the 
“gendered identity” of the cello. Debates about gender in music generally go back to the 
1980s, but, so far, they have not impinged on performance studies to an equivalent degree. 
Kennaway first examines perceptions of the cello as an instrument, then, in one of the most 
original and suggestive parts of the book, how perceived gender characteristics may work out 
in performance. At the beginning of the period, the cello was definitely a “manly” instrument, 
its character grave, earnest, sublime, not exciting the passions with the wild and violent 
movements of the violin. Throughout there was a question about its suitability for women, 
particularly in Britain. As late as the 1930s, the BBC Symphony Orchestra banned female 
cellists, prompting Ethyl Smyth to reflect that, in her lifetime, first it had been riding bicy-
cles, then riding astride, and now the ban on the cello was “the drowning clinging to a spar” 
(188). Augustus John’s portrait of Madame Suggia must have had an influence. It may not 
have been a particularly close likeness, but that is not the point. What he was painting was 
her intense physical relationship with the instrument and the magnificently heroic effect. 
Havelock Ellis thought the cello the perfect instrument for women; there is much sub-text in 
descriptions of the gender characteristics of instruments. 
David Ledbetter 
 
 
 
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol20/iss1/3                                                                                                  4 
This all coheres into practical usefulness when it comes to the character and projection of 
musical ideas. Kennaway takes as case studies works of the Bohrer brothers, Romberg, and 
Lalo. The violinist Anton Bohrer’s string quartet was praised by Berlioz when they gave the 
first performances in Paris of Beethoven’s late quartets. The Duos Anton wrote with his cel-
list brother Max in the 1820s and 30s are quite another matter. There is nothing of the ear-
nest, cantabile nature of the cello, but a demonstration that the cello could match the virtuoso 
techniques of the violin in a circus act of transcendental execution. This is the opposite end of 
the spectrum from the high priests of German classicism, and there is a broad range of inter-
vening hues. Real insights come when this point of view is adopted for works of more sub-
stance. Kennaway offers astute assessment of Romberg’s Concerto Op. 3 in D, then con-
vincingly applies Vincent d’Indy’s (1909) gendering of themes to the first movement of the 
Lalo Concerto (1877) in order to see what possible performance implications there may be. 
D’Indy’s classifications have naturally provoked much comment, and they certainly tell us 
more about social and cultural attitudes of their time than about anything else, but they do 
belong in the same world as Lalo. Taking criteria developed in recent gender literature, Ken-
naway shows features that might justify identifying D’Indy’s “seconde féminine.” He then 
examines the first recordings of the Concerto (by Suggia, Cassadó, Navarra, and Nelsova, 
with a look also at Jacqueline Dupré) to see if any of this is evident in performances. Perhaps 
unsurprisingly, in spite of the wildly different personalities of the players, there is little evi-
dence of that sort of character contrast in any of the performances. Is there a whole dimension 
of character contrast, which could be explored with subtlety and depth, that we have been 
missing? 
It is difficult in a brief review to convey the sheer range of types of source and 
performance covered in this book, all with admirable openness and fair-mindedness. Where 
does it all lead in a world where professional musicians look for quick rules of thumb and 
follow-my-leader fashionability? The answer cannot be just, say, Brahms Symphonies with 
little vibrato, Urtext tempo, and self-conscious, clip-on portamentos. One view I would take 
issue with is that, in the case of Baroque music, “authenticity” in the 1980s stood for the 
elimination of personal interpretation in performance and that the performance of Baroque 
repertoires has since then become more experimental. This was not the experience of Bruce 
Haynes, a leading contributor throughout that period, who vividly demonstrated with sound 
clips that the 1970s and 80s were a period of startling progress in flexibility and nuance, pro-
gress that has since been rowed back from in what Haynes calls “strait” performance (as in 
straitjacket).4 This is not to say that there are no groups doing remarkable things now. The 
case of Baroque music is misleading in that the instruments are so different from modern 
ones, and themselves suggest, not to say dictate, performing style. The craft of music and the 
nature of musical expression differed as well. There was surely a watershed around 1800 
when music moved on to a much more personally emotional plane and the nature of musical 
projection changed. The twentieth century then brought its own overlay. Listening now to, 
say, the Hungarian Quartet’s highly regarded Beethoven recordings of the 1950s, one is 
struck by the technical solidity but also by the sameness of high-powered sound through 
vastly different moods, except for the one moment in Op.132 where the vibrato is switched 
                                                
4 Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), with associated 
website. 
Book Review: Playing the Cello 
 
 
Performance Practice Review, vol. 20 (2015)                                                                                                   5 
off. We have come a long way since then, but not as far as some would have us believe.5 
Kennaway has provided a superb resource for talented and curious cellists who seek to de-
velop their own imaginative response to the music of the long nineteenth century. 
                                                
5 See for example Clive Brown, “Performing 19th-Century Chamber Music: The Yawning Chasm Be-
tween Contemporary Practice and Historical Evidence,” Early Music 38 (2010): 476-80. 


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