Mr. Isley's violins and violas cost about $12,000; his cellos run about $25,000.
Majeed found his cello player running a tea stall; others were selling clothes or electrical parts.
The original cry of Godzilla himself, a cry that obsessed me and terrified me as a child, was apparently created by running a glove across cello strings, but that's not the only thing that sounds masterful in the original Godzilla.
The vivace has a wry and humorous opening, with scurrying fast notes; a combative middle section, as the two instruments are responsive to each other and a jazzy quality pervades the final section with running pizzicatos in the cello and dryly articulated fast notes in the piano.
Currents of humor run through these: in the cello work, the live cellist and a recorded cello line gradually distort a Bach sarabande; in the Bach section of the "Baroque Variations," a bottle is smashed with a hammer, and Johann Sebastian Bach is spelled out in Morse code by a xylophone.
The Cello Unwrapped series runs at Kings Place, London, from 7 January.
Narek Hakhnazaryan brought sweet, warm tone to Elgar's Cello Concerto, and Ran Dank met the tremendous technical challenges of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto.
His repertoire as an instrumentalist ran from Bach, whose solo cello suites he played with particular distinction, through Shostakovich – his recordings of the two cello concertos remain benchmarks – to contemporary music, with which he also had an affinity.
But the ending is lovely: gossamer, calligraphic runs up and down the cello, barely audible over uneasy chords that resolve into the same high, quiet shimmer with which the work began.
When the NCA inform Charles that Sophie is to be removed to an orphanage, the pair go on the run, heading for Paris, to trace the cello maker whose address they have discovered inside Sophie's cello case.
