cello

This cello was donated to the Musical Instrument Fund in 2012 by a very generous 87-year-old private individual. She had played the cello herself since 1987. Before her, it had been her mother—a professional cellist—who played the Dall’Aglio for many years, and she, in turn, had received the cello from her own mother. The cello thus passed from mother to daughter over three generations before it came into the possession of the Musical Instrument Fund. The donor’s mother had a Russian father and, after completing her schooling in the Netherlands, spent a year in Russia. According to family lore, she stayed that year in a house where Tchaikovsky had once lived. Due to the 1917 revolution, she fled back to the West, traveling by boat to Sweden. Because there were so many people on the boat, all luggage (including the cello) had to be placed in a tender. She refused, saying that if that were necessary, she would also take a seat in that tender. She was then given permission to keep the cello on the main ship. That turned out to be a very wise decision, as the baggage boat is said to have sunk within sight of the harbor in Sweden. The donor had assumed that the cello had been built by Testore; after all, it bore his label, but research revealed that it had been built by Dall’Aglio. The fact that its value turned out to be considerably higher than initially assumed did not change her decision to donate the cello to the Musical Instrument Fund. In 2012, the Musical Instrument Fund loaned the Dall’Aglio to Gideon den Herder (principal cellist of the Residentie Orkest).