ABSTRACT
Although the examination of Cassadó’s Catalan background and the influence of Casals have provided us with a thorough contextualisation of his performance style, this study would be incomplete without a similar discussion of Cassadó’s recordings in their global and historical context. Indeed, as this chapter will show, the historical context had an equally, if not more, observable influence on Cassadó’s performance style and its development. Performers are often described as belonging to a certain gener - ation of a particular tradition or idiom, just as they are often portrayed as belonging to certain ‘schools’, yet we also acknowledge that great per - formers have their own personal and inimitable style. Few studies have been made on this topic but several articles, and the recent A Musicology of Performance: Theory and Method Based on Bach’s Solos for Violin, by Dorottya Fabian, emphasise the plurality and wide range of personal styles in violin recordings, even within the last thirty years (Fabian, 2015). The discussions in this chapter are aimed at discovering evidence in Cassadó’s recordings regarding his relation to a particular generation of performers, hereafter called ‘the generation of the 1920s’ after the decade when Cassadó and his contemporaries reached maturity as artists, and to examine his role within the development of cello performance during the first half of the twentieth century.
