The cellist who lost his quartet
OrchestrasWhen Welsh cellist Paul Watkins joined the Emerson Quartet in 2013, he would have assumed that America’s foremost string quartet would go on forever. In the event, it lasted another decade and then Watkins was on his own again.
He was not that daunted. When he was picked to lead the cello section of the BBC Symphony at the age of 20 he had never given a professional performance before. ‘It was all terribly glamorous and just stlightly out of reach,’ he tells David Krauss in the latest episode of Speaking Soundly.
Listen here.
“To loose your instrument on the subway is a tragedy, but loosing a whole quartet is an act of unforgivable carelessness.” (Dixit Aunt Augusta in The Importance of Being Musically Earnest)