Margalit Fox: belief

Transcript context

…What if I say, “Well, Casals was a bit like Schnabel. He had incredible profundity, but there’s just too much scraping on a lot of his recordings, and in some ways they’re hard to listen to today”? He was path-breaking, but if you were to sit down and put on, say, the Bach cello suites, actually very few people, including cello lovers, would pick Casals, right? They’d pick János Starker, they’d pick Heinrich Schiff, or — do you agree or not? It’s true, in light of modern sensibilities, you can certainly hear squeaks and occasional bits of strangeness in Casals’s cello suites. I suspect he was older when he recorded them. He lived to be, of course, almost 100. Recording technology has improved since then, and I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a bye. He can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal. If you had to pick a favorite cellist — I know it’s hard to do, but do you have a pick?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.