| Biography | Edmund Kurtz was born in St Petersburg in 1908 into a musical family and had his first lessons on the piano, but with little success. In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, the family left for Germany and the nine-year-old Edmund started to learn the cello.
In 1944 Kurtz resigned from orchestral playing in order to devote himself to his rapidly expanding solo career. He first appeared as a soloist before the American public in 1945 playing the Dvorák Concerto with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. The performance was also recorded and has recently been reissued as a CD as the only recording of that work ever made under the baton of the Italian maestro.
Throughout his performing career, Kurtz had been unhappy about the various editions of the Bach Six Solo Suites. He knew instinctively that the bowings and fingerings were not right. So in 1978, at the age of 70, he decided to make a new edition based strictly on the Anna Magdalena manuscript - the only one extant. It took him four years to complete and it was published in 1983 with the facsimile of the Berlin MS facing every page. It has since gone into numerous printings and is today recognised as the most important edition of the greatest music ever written for the instrument. |