My beloved cello teacher Bruno Schrecker died today just 4 days short of his 98th birthday.  I have known Bruno since I was 12 years old, when I met him at a chamber music course called Pro Corda.  Bruno was teaching one of the quartets I was in and we were playing a particularly beautiful piece by Borodin which has a lovely cello part.

I didn’t see him again until 7 years later when he walked into my room at the Royal Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath with my consultant rheumatologist.  Somehow he had found out I was there being treated for fibromyalgia pain syndrome.

Then I didn’t see him again until our doorbell in Bath rang 20 years later and there was Bruno with his son, come to see my husband Christian for hypnotherapy.  From then on I saw him pretty much every week until we moved back to Australia in 2019.  In 2015-2016 I recorded over 7 hours of interviews with him talking about his extraordinary life (which you can read about in the obituaries in The Guardian and The Telegraph).

Since coming back to the UK in 2023 I have seen a lot of Bruno, having cello lessons and meditating together on his sofa, usually with a cat between us.  In his later years, we talked a lot about Buddhism which he said made the most sense to him as a philosophy.

I feel immensely privileged to have spent so much time with him, and benefitted so much from his passion for the cello.  He was much loved and is much missed.