British cello virtuoso Steven Isserlis to team up in Sydney with Richard Tognetti and the ACO
Most people don’t park a white cello case next to the table when they’re at a cafe for breakfast. But Steven Isserlis never strays far from his 1745 Montagnana.
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MOST people don’t park a white cello case next to the table when they’re at a cafe for breakfast. But Steven Isserlis never strays far from his 1745 Montagnana, especially when he’s this far away from his London home.
Isserlis, 59, is in Sydney to play with his old mates at the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Isserlis and ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti have been making fine music together since 1992, and Isserlis says they share a similar sense of humour that makes rehearsals a great deal of fun.
“You could say we’re master baiters,” he says.
Isserlis is “self appointed” godfather to Tognetti’s teenage son. And since this is the first time he’s played with the ACO since 2013, Isserlis — one of the world’s most acclaimed cellists — is loving it.
The program is titled Steven Isserlis Plays Shostakovich, and the piece in question is the Russian composer’s Cello Concerto No.1 in E-flat major.
It’s a driving, restless, sometimes percussive piece which makes Isserlis think of “a man being crushed by a machine”.
Totalitarian USSR certainly tried to crush Shostakovich when his compositions sparked political displeasure. But he wrote the Cello Concerto No. 1 in 1959, which was after the death of Stalin. So wasn’t the conformist political pressure off the composer by then?
“I think once you’ve been in that much danger, it never leaves you,” Isserlis says decisively.
Isserlis’ own roots go back to Russia. His grandfather, the distinguished pianist and composer Julius Isserlis, studied with Sergei Taneyev. Taneyeve had been Tchaikovsky’s favourite student.
“Originally (Julius) was a student, and then he used to send all his latest compositions to Taneyev for approval,” Isserlis says.
Lenin allowed Julius to temporarily leave the USSR in 1922. Julius never returned. He died in London, where he had eventually settled, in 1968. He could no longer play the piano in his final years, because his fingers were so stiff with age, Steven Isserlis recalls.
“I do vaguely remember him trying to play,” he says.
Julius Isserlis did not meet Shostakovich, but certainly met the other great Russian modernist composer Prokofiev.
Julius’s son George, Steven’s father, was born in Odessa and grew up in Vienna. He wrote his memoirs, titled From East To West, which the family was preparing to publish as a surprise for George’s 95th birthday.
“I was working on it, and it was like two weeks before his 95th birthday and he died. So he never saw it. It’s so sad,” Isserlis says.
Although English was George’s fourth language, the memoirs are beautifully written, Isserlis says. Like George, Isserlis has a great passion for literature and is a constant reader.
Music and musical history filled the family home when Steven was a boy. George was an amateur violinist. Steven’s mother Cynthia taught piano. Both of Isserlis’s sisters are musicians. Annette plays the viola and lives in Kent. She was a founder-member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Rachel plays the violin and lives in Germany.
“I’m the baby boy — the spoilt brat,” Isserlis says.
He is certainly spoilt for choice as to which cello he will play. As well as his Montagnana, Steven has the 1726 Marquis de Corberon Stradivarius, on loan to him from the Royal Academy of Music. But for Shostakovich, Isserlis always chooses his Montagnana.
“For Shostakovich I tend to play modern steel strings,” he says.
“It’s comparatively modern music. It was written for steel strings.”
While some people are prepared to fit steel strings to their Strads, Isserlis is not.
“It’s not good for the cello, but also (the Strad) sounds so beautiful with the old strings,” he says.
Possibly because he has toured with the ACO so many times in the past, Isserlis is quite familiar with Australian culture. He is friends with Barry Humphries. He has never met comedian Chris Lilley, but adores Summer Heights High and Angry Boys.
“Somebody who can play twin boys and their grandmother equally convincingly is a genius,” Isserlis says.
Steven Isserlis Plays Shostakovich, June 30 to July 4 at City Recital Hall, Angel Place; July 1 at Sydney Opera House, $49-$142, aco.com.au