Two things drove 6-foot-5 Israeli-American Amit Peled to choose the cello over hoops:
- Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto.
- Famed Spanish cellist Pablo Casals’ cello.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, Peled joins the Tucson Symphony Orchestra for a unique concert centered on the Casals cello and the Elgar concerto. Peled, for the first time since Casals’ widow loaned him the famous cellist’s instrument last year, will perform the Elgar Concerto on the cello he grew up admiring.
“It’s funny because Elgar and the cello that I’m playing are probably the two reasons why I’m a cellist today,” the 42-year-old Peled said during a phone interview from his Baltimore home in mid-September. “Of course I am playing with the cello of Pablo Casals and I grew up on his recordings and his sound and I never imagined that one day I would be playing on that cello. This will be the first time I am playing the Elgar on that cello. I have played it many times before but not on the Casals cello.”
“It’s a wonderful cello concerto by Elgar, but when you add the fact of it being played on Pablo Casals’s cello, it adds an exciting element to it, which is something very wonderful,” added guest conductor José Luis Gomez.
Peled’s reference to the Elgar comes from listening to English cellist Jaqueline Du Pre’s 1965 recording that is largely regarded as the benchmark for how that piece should sound.
“The amount of times I listened to that recording growing up is endless. I can’t even count it. To be able to combine that special piece and this special instrument on one occasion is really amazing,” said Peled, who briefly flirted with the idea of pursuing basketball as a career when he was a teen. “I was not tall enough back then,” he said.
Peled has been playing the Casals cello since his Casals’ widow Marta Casals Istomin loaned it to him in 2014. He was the third cellist to whom she loaned the instrument since Casals, one of the greatest cellists of all time, died in 1973 at the age of 96.
“It’s not an easy instrument to play,” Peled said. “At the end of the day, everybody credits the cello: ‘The cello sounds so good.’ But you really need a good driver to drive an old Rolls Royce.”
Peled lovingly describes how the Casals cello “suggests colors to the performer that you did not know existed.”
“When you play such a cello and you know how not to disturb it, it allows you to find your own voice and your own soul can come out better and the public will appreciate it much more. …. It brings the performer to a deeper place,” he said.
Istomin never placed a time limit on the loan. Peled said he figures he will have it for couple more years; he has several concerts on the books all centered on the Casals cello, including a tribute recital for Istomin on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C.
“There will be an end to it, and I kind of feel that there should be,” Peled said. “My job is … to promote (Casals’) legacy and to make sure that nobody forgets about it. A lot of young students and young audiences don’t even know who Casals was and what he represented. I feel sort of an ambassador, really, and I know there will be a day when somebody else will have to carry on that mission.”
