Amit Peled is a 6 feet 5 inches basketball-loving Israeli from Kibbutz Yizre’el. He is also cello professor at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University, the oldest conservatory in the United States, and he performs as a cellist all around the world. He is currently playing the cello that belonged to his hero, the legendary cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973), a cello created by a Venetian luthier around 1733.

The morning after the Passover seder, TLV1’s Laragh Widdess traveled to the north of Israel to hear Amit play an intimate concert at the Ein Harod Museum of Art, not far from his kibbutz. Afterwards they sat down to discuss Amit’s journey from the kibbutz to the conservatory, and how it feels coming home for Passover and performing on Casals’ legendary cello to an audience of friends and family.

Amit is performing a free concert at the Ra’anana Music Center on the evening of Wednesday 27 April. His live-streamed cello masterclasses can be viewed here.

Read: Wall Street Journal – “Pablo Casals’s Cello Gets a New Life”

Music, performed by Amit Peled unless otherwise stated:
David Popper – Tarantelle, Op. 33
J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No.3 (performed by Pablo Casals)
J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No.1  (performed by Pablo Casals)
Sulkhan Tsintsadze – Sachidao (from Five Pieces on Folk Themes for Cello and Piano)
Joachim Stutschewsky – Nuts And Wine (from Hassidic Suite for Cello and Piano)
Ernest Bloch – Prayer (from From Jewish Life for Cello and Piano)
Joachim Stutschewsky – Dance (from Hassidic Suite for Cello and Piano)

Written and produced by Laragh Widdess