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Janet Banks reads amateur US cellist George Sorensen’s account of taking up the instrument in his later years, and becoming good enough to play the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun
The Cello Who Loved Me
George Sorensen
260PP ISBN 9798999877116
FLEXIBLE PRESS $20
After travelling the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a 71-year-old man from Oregon hears a Spanish cellist and feels an overwhelming attraction to the instrument. Back home George Sorensen begins a quest to learn the cello and everything about it. He also sets himself what seemed to me a totally unrealistic goal – playing the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun on a Stradivari cello.
Sorensen’s musical experience up to this point has been as trombonist and drum major in his school band and singing in college musicals. He approaches the cello from a position of complete ignorance of stringed instruments and explains everything to the reader as it was explained to him.
He finds a teacher, a violinist in the Oregon Symphony with decades of experience but a questionable grasp of the cello bow hold (I shuddered every time he described ‘getting his thumb comfy in the U-shaped hole’) and sets off on his voyage of discovery, meeting players, luthiers and bow makers in his part of the world.
The tone is genial and humorous. Sorensen writes as he speaks, and goes off on a tangent many times, just as if he was telling you his story over a glass of ale. At times I wanted to put the editor’s pen to his raconteuring. But then that might have lost us heartwarming chapters like ‘Stan the Panda Man’ – a childhood reminiscence of a friend winning him a giant panda at a fair. Just as I was wondering where he was going with this, the connection came: ‘When I wrapped myself around the stuffed panda, I felt an inordinate sense of joy. At times, when I get the rich tone from the cello, it’s as though I’m wrapped around the cello the same way I wrapped myself around my panda back then.’
And believe it or not, he did achieve his goal. At the end of the book, through sheer persistence and Tigger-like keenness, ‘one of the newest and worst cello players upon Earth’ sits in a storeroom at the National Museum of American History and plays Here Comes the Sun to his friend – unbelievable!
JANET BANKS
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