"When in March 2022, we gathered with a thousand people in the glorious Laurens Kerk in Alkmaar to bid my son Dorian farewell, there was a lot of beautiful music performed. I felt compelled to play the "Sarabande" from Bach’s fifth cello suite, as to me its recurring interval of the diminished fourth so strongly symbolised our family that was reduced from four to three members. That the top string of the cello has to be tuned down, taking away its natural shine and turning the cello into a messenger of darkness, was another incentive. The Kodály Sonata is the other timeless piece for cello in scordatura. In this case, both bottom strings are tuned down a semitone: our lives have been retuned and we have to make do. There is a glimpse of hope in the fact that meaningful things can be said on a wrongly tuned cello."
⎯ Pieter Wispelwey