Steven Isserlis is disarmingly direct. Like Jim Carrey’s character in the film Liar Liar, it’s as if he seems compelled to say just what he thinks. There’s no sense of evasion, misdirection or padding, no public persona to be maintained, no concern to spend time over a question if the cellist feels he has nothing in particular to say about it. He has no fear about curt responses. Talking to him is always a no-bullshit experience.
I ask him why music, why the cello? “I come from a musical family. My grandfather” – Julius Isserlis, 1888-1968 – “was a famous pianist and composer in his day. My mother was a piano teacher. My father was an amateur violinist. Both my sisters are musicians. So I had no choice. My elder sister plays viola, my middle sister plays the violin. We needed a cello. So that was me. I played the piano as well. I still play the piano very badly, but it’s very useful for my work. Like any boy, I went through phases of wanting to be this or that, but not seriously. Cello was always going to be it from the age of about 10.”
And things have turned out pretty much as he expected – “a life full of music. The cello is my chosen instrument and still my favourite instrument.”
I recently watched a video of Isserlis, who performs in Dublin this month, at the National Concert Hall, giving a chamber-music masterclass at Wigmore Hall, in London, about the work of Gabriel Fauré. The French composer (1845-1924), whose often reserved style is still elusive to contemporary performers, is one of his great passions. As a teacher Isserlis conveys a sense of easily carried, encyclopaedic knowledge, acquired over more than half a century of living with the cello. So, given how wonderful a performer he was at the start of his career, when he had assimilated far less than he has now, what is it that a performer needs most beyond experience, beyond knowledge?
“I think curiosity is important. I mean, I’m still spending a lot of my life reading about and around the music I’m playing. I’m about to do a recording of music by Schumann and Moscheles.” Ignaz Moscheles, a pupil of Beethoven, spent three weeks in Dublin, in 1826, and after he left composed The Recollections of Ireland, a grand fantasia for piano and orchestra on three Irish airs. And, as Isserlis, points out, he was one of the few people who continued to play the harpsichord into the 19th century, “very rare for those days”.
“So I’m reading as much as I can,” says Isserlis, “just to give me background, because it’s inspiring. It doesn’t necessarily affect the way I play. But, as a teacher, I think it’s quite important. So you’re not just spouting your opinions, but you can back it up with facts about the composer and what he or she said about the music. And there’s also studying the actual music itself, the form, the harmonies and everything.
“I don’t think I would ever go against my instinct, but my instinct is backed up by objective knowledge about the music. So it’s probably more important as a teacher than as a player to have all these facts at your fingertips. But it’s also maybe that you get more convinced the more you know about a piece, and then the more convinced you can be. And if you’re convinced you’re more likely to be convincing. Having spent a lot of my life reading about Schumann and about Fauré, I think maybe it has helped my interpretation become more ... convinced is really the word ... more ... maybe more speaking.”
Isserlis clearly doesn’t think of the issue at all in terms of nature versus nurture. “There should never be any contradiction between the two. I would never go against my instincts because of some fact that I’d learned. But, to take an obvious example, how would you know about double-dotting in Bach without knowledge of it, without reading about it?” Double-dotting is an 18th-century practice in which certain rhythms are made snappier and crisper by altering the written note values. “You wouldn’t, unless somebody told you. And yet, once you know it, you think, Ah, yes, that’s right. Subconsciously you knew it all the time. But it was subconscious and you wouldn’t dare do it unless you knew. That’s a perfect example of nurture and nature combining.”
He also separates good tradition from bad tradition. “The tradition of finding out how Handel or Bach would have played their music, that’s good tradition. The tradition of listening to other people’s recordings, that’s bad tradition. Of course it’s not always bad. But it can lead to imitation, which is not such a good idea.”
Still on the subject of youth versus age and experience, I ask what his current self might have to say to his younger self. “‘Don’t be stupid about your career’ would be one thing. Because I used to think if somebody was important I should ignore them or be rude to them, so I wasn’t sucking up. I was pretty stupid. I’d say don’t be arrogant. And, also, stick with what you believe in. Which I sort of did.
“I don’t even particularly like talking about them, but I do play most of my concerts still on gut strings, and I was told so many times, ‘You’ll never make any career if you stick to those gut strings. It can’t be done.’ And I’m glad I did, because I still believe in them. It’s still a sort of religion for me, as it was for my teacher,” he says, referring to Jane Cowan, who died in 1996.
The gut strings, he says, are not just about the sound but also about the style. “It’s a simpler way of playing. You can do much less on gut strings, because the sound is alive. It doesn’t sound dead. But last week I was in Singapore, playing on steel strings. Which I also enjoy. But it’s just a less pure style of playing.” Then, after a pause, while looking tut-tuttingly up to heaven, he adds, “That’s a generalisation, of course.”
And what might his young self say to his current self? “‘Dye your hair? It looks better brown.’ I don’t know. I don’t think my young self would be interested in my older self. It’s an interesting question that I’ve never thought about. My older self would have more to say to my younger self than vice versa. I don’t look forward to making mistakes. But I can look backwards and advise him not to do those.”
And what might his younger self be surprised about? “That I’m so old. Which I’m surprised about as well, because I don’t feel it. I’ve become, in a way, establishment. I’m artistic director of IMS Prussia Cove, which is a pretty big thing,” says Isserlis about the International Musicians Seminars at Prussia Cove in Cornwall. “I’d be surprised by that. Because I was even banned from studying there for two or three years. I had behaved rather badly. I think the last straw was that I was with Nigel Kennedy in a gambling arcade, and we missed the bus back to the Prussia Cove estate and got stuck in Truro or St Ives for the night. That did not go down well. Now I’ve been artistic director there for over 25 years, my younger self would be very surprised by that.”
Isserlis leaped to fame in 1989 with the world premiere of the late John Tavener’s ecstatic The Protecting Veil, and he also has ongoing relationships with the composers Thomas Adès and György Kurtág. “Composers are so different from each other in their approach. With John Tavener I could basically tell him how I wanted to play his music, and I found it very easy to understand his work. Whereas with Kurtág, or Adès or Heinz Holliger, they are very demanding and they know exactly what they want. It’s actually a pleasure to try and make them happy. I’ve always enjoyed working with composers. I don’t do it that much, because I’m not a quick learner. But when I do it I really enjoy it. It’s a luxury. If you have a question about Beethoven it’s quite difficult to get an answer from the composer.”
[ Thomas Adès on Simon Rattle: ‘He really does have a composer’s understanding’Opens in new window ]
Do the experiences with living composers inform in any way his approach to Haydn, whose 1783 Cello Concerto in D he is playing with the National Symphony Orchestra? “With some composers, even Kurtág – who’s 98 – it’s not impossible I could suggest some changes and things. And so, with Haydn, you feel the same sort of easy familiarity, that you can take liberties with some things, some little details which you could have suggested had he been in the room. I can’t think of anything I should change in a Haydn concerto. But I feel that Haydn is a friend. It does make a difference to work with composers. You somehow get to know what you can change and what you can’t.”
Steven Isserlis plays Haydn at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, with the National Symphony Orchestra under Peter Whelan on Friday, January 24th, in a programme that also includes works by Mozart and Dvorak