Michal Kaznowski, cellist and teacher who shone at the CBSO before specialising in string quartets – obituary
Michal Kaznowski, who has died of a heart attack aged 69, was an outstanding British cellist who showed early brilliance at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) and later shone in the celebrated Bochmann and Maggini string quartets.
He became a gifted and inspirational teacher of talented teenagers, many of whom went on to great things, several securing principal cello jobs in big-name orchestras. He also spoke out about the traumatic abuse he had suffered as a teenager at the Yehudi Menuhin School, determined that no other youngster should have to endure what he had.
Michal Kaznowski was born on January 17 1954 in Norfolk, the third of six children of Adam Apolinary Kaznowski and Helen, née Hughes. Adam had been a professional cellist in the then Polish city of Lviv before war intervened.
Serving with the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division, he managed to survive the Siberian gulag and the battle of Monte Cassino, and found himself at the end of the war teaching the cello at a demobilisation camp at Bodney in Norfolk. There, he started to play piano trios with a local vicar, whose daughter, Helen, came back to Norfolk for Christmas; in 1949, Adam married her.
In the mid-1960s the family moved to Middlesbrough so that Adam could take up a job teaching languages in a technical college, but just six months later he died, leaving Helen with six children. Michal was 11 and heartbroken at the loss of his father.
The little boy’s precocious gifts were evident early on, and not limited to music. He could already read aged three, and went on to excel in mathematics and sciences, as well as showing prodigious talent as a cellist. He was picked for the National Youth Orchestra and, at 14, was awarded a full scholarship to the famous Yehudi Menuhin School.
There, however, he was humiliated and abused by his French cello professor, Maurice Gendron. “When Gendron was around it was like Saddam Hussein had come to town,” Kaznowski told The Independent. “You are talking about sadistic control freakery.”
Gendron reduced him to tears during lessons, even knocking his bow out of his hand. “He would wait until the weekly cello teacher had left the room, then ask me about my masturbation habits and about my sex life. I was 14.”
These experiences haunted him for the rest of his life. “He would always get physically tense when he talked about them,” recalled Martin Outram, a fellow member of the Maggini string quartet. Kaznowski later publicly condemned what he claimed were widespread failures of safeguarding in specialist music schools.
In his own teaching, by contrast, he resolved never to develop a fixed idea of how an individual player should sound, and he was renowned for his generosity, supporting his pupils in final rehearsals when they were preparing to appear as soloists with orchestras.
Kaznowski well understood the pressures on young players, having been appointed principal cellist of the CBSO aged only 25. “Michal had a fantastic musical ethic,” said John Tattersdill, the then leader of the bass section. “His absolute professional dedication was second to none.”
In his determination to raise standards, he could be famously combative – something that Simon Rattle, his fellow-prodigy and near-contemporary at the Royal Academy of Music, witnessed first-hand when he was made principal conductor of the CBSO a year after Kaznowski became principal cellist. In 1982, an ITV documentary captured Kaznowski accosting Rattle at the end of a rehearsal with typical intensity.
“Simon, you know we have that triplet figuration here...” he says eagerly, beginning to count out the time in the section of the score where he thought there had been uncertainty. “Not now, Michal,” says Rattle, backing off. “I have to get a train now. I’ll answer you tomorrow.”
Another fellow player recalled Kaznowski coming to his house, arguing about music, and then delivering the withering put-down that perhaps the ears of a musician incapable of getting his domestic hi-fi speakers in phase were not to be trusted.
After four colourful years at the CBSO, Kaznowski joined the Bochmann String Quartet in 1983, quickly realising that in chamber music he had found his metier.
He married Sarah Hedley-Miller, another member of the CBSO cello section, who later joined the BBC Symphony Orchestra. For Kaznowski, even the arrival of two children took second place to his music: he displayed typical single-mindedness when he insisted that his daughter be delivered by elective caesarean the day before he was performing in a major recital, to avoid disrupting his schedule.
Kaznowski’s playing was always “classy, immaculate, full of personality and yet he never produced a harsh sound”, said Thomas Bowes, the original leader of the Maggini Quartet, the group which emerged from the Bochmann in 1988 and is still performing. “He had a velvety, purry sound, and every phrase he played had the clarity, the enunciation, of Nat King Cole.”
Kaznowksi particularly revered the violin and viola players Janine Jansen, Yuri Bashmet and Tabea Zimmermann and he always encouraged cello players to seek technical solutions to achieve similar lightness.
The Maggini’s star performances include nearly 40 discs of British 20th-century chamber music for the Naxos label, starting with the Moeran quartets released in 1997. Discs from this series received two Grammy nominations, and a host of awards from magazines including Gramophone, BBC Music and Diapason. The Maggini also recorded 10 quartets by Peter Maxwell Davies for Naxos and gave all their first performances.
The quartet, which regularly coached up-and-coming quartets in the UK and Norway, remained a constant fixture in Kaznowski’s life. The day he died, the group was due to rehearse Dvořák in London. A bon viveur, he loved good food. “He ate a full English breakfast every day for 40 years,” his wife recalled. “I always said it would be the death of him – and in the end it was.”
She survives him, together with their son and daughter.
Michal Kaznowski, born January 17 1954, died May 10 2023
