The Latvian-born, Russian-trained, Belgium-residing Israeli cellist Mischa Maisky is nothing if not larger than life. It's a quality that's not just there in the glowing romantic warmth of his playing; he seems to be flamboyant by nature. The first time I heard him in concert, playing solo cello suites by Bach, he went through three differently coloured silk shirts during the evening. And it's there in his embrace of every question I ask him when I speak to him in his hotel room in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, where he has been giving masterclasses.
Maisky gives the final concert of Music for Galway's new online-only Cellissimo festival with his pianist daughter Lily, playing Beethoven, Britten, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Piazzolla. He's also involved in Ludmila Snigireva's talk about one of his teachers, Mstislav Rostropovich. And there's a festival screening of the 2018 documentary The Cellist: The Legacy of Gregor Piatigorsky, about another of the great cellists he studied with.
So what makes the cello so special?
“It’s a kind of cliche for people to say the cello is the closest instrument to the human voice,” says Maisky. “For me, the human voice is the most perfect instrument, because it wasn’t made by human hands. It’s made by nature, or whatever you want to believe.
I always tell young cellists, don't ever idolise anyone. No matter of famous or how fabulous a performer is, always question what they do
“I would love to have been a singer. But, okay, I don’t have the voice, so I try to play and record songs on the cello. One can make even a case that, as far as range is concerned, the cello is even more universal than any human voice. It can reproduce the lowest bass register and go higher than any soprano. In certain arrangements I use both.
Special appeal
“The cello,” he adds, “has some kind of special appeal. I don’t really know how to explain it. And there’s something about cellists as well. No other instrumentalists have so many of their own festivals, congresses, societies. Cellists are a very friendly bunch as a general rule. And at festivals and congresses they have huge ensembles of cellists. A hundred cellists is normal. In Japan, in Kobe, there is a cello convention with ensembles of 1,000 cellos. Can you believe it?” In fact, the Guinness Book of Records gives a 1998 Kobe ensemble a tally of 1,013.
Maisky, it turns out, is extremely fond of stories and jokes. He offers one about the difference between a cello and a violin: the cello burns longer. Then he adds: “There’s a better piano joke among musicians in Russian. Why is it better to play on the concert grand piano as opposed to the upright? Because on the upright it’s too high to deal.”
I don't know if an unusual number of Russian pianists play cards, although it has been said that when the composer Richard Strauss conducted his own operas, he often made more money playing skat afterwards than he earned from his conducting fee.
The first big influence on Maisky, “obviously, is one of my two great teachers, Rostropovich. From the moment I started playing cello at the age of eight, I totally idolised him. I always tell young cellists, don’t ever idolise anyone. It’s not healthy, though I know it may be normal for young people. You should idolise the composers and not the performers. No matter of famous or how fabulous a performer is, always question what they do. Don’t just blindly follow or imitate them.”
In spite of that, he says, “When I spoke about Rostropovich when I was young my neck hurt, because I was looking up so high. It was the dream of my life to study with him, and I spent four years with him officially in the Moscow Conservatory.”
Second father
Maisky began studying with Rostropovich a few months after his own father had passed away. “In a way he became like a second father to me. And I always say, maybe partly because one of his very few, unfulfilled ambitions and dreams in life was to have a son. He had two daughters, but never had a son. He told me, even in our last conversation, you know you are like a son to me. Then he added, prodigal son!
“When I went to Piatigorsky after I left the Soviet Union, it was Rostropovich’s suggestion. I didn’t realise it until later that he was hoping I would react by thinking, after Rostropovich, there is nobody.”
The four months with Piatigorsky, says Maisky, was the best time of his life. “I’m not implying that he was a better teacher than Rostropovich. That would be as naive as to say that Mozart was a better composer than Bach. It’s ridiculous to make such a comparison. But as a student it was a beginning of my new life, I was full of positive energy. It was the end of Piatigorsky’s life and he knew it.
“And he loved speaking Russian. He spoke beautiful Russian, not the way you speak nowadays. I didn’t speak any English, I basically picked up my English on the streets of Los Angeles while studying with him. We communicated in Russian. It was very intense. I probably spent more time with him during those four months than with Rostropovich during the four years, because Rostropovich had to travel so much. It was totally unforgettable.”
Then he mentions Pablo Casals, the man who reinvigorated the world of cello playing at the beginning of the 20th century, and who introduced the Bach cello suites, once regarded as nothing more than technical exercises, to the cellist's repertoire. "I played for him two months before he died, for an hour and a half in Jerusalem, on August 18th, 1973, when he was almost 97 years young."
He likens the vitality of Casals to that of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, "who I met when he was 89". He wants, like them, "to live very long but to die young. In spirit they were amazing, quite unbelievable."
His relationship with Casals’s playing is rather more complex. “His recording of the Bach solo cello suites [made in the 1930s] is interesting. I have more than 55 different recordings of the Bach suites. I have listened to all of them, some of them many times. A few years ago someone gave me a present in Japan of the remastered version of the Casals recording. I listened again. I hadn’t heard it for many years. And I was very surprised and impressed at how much I was unconsciously influenced by his interpretation. Probably more than anyone else.”
Negative
That’s in spite of the fact that Maisky’s earliest reaction, at the age or 12 or 13, had been negative. Then he preferred Rostropovich’s Bach. “I thought it was ideal and Casals was completely crazy. A few years later I still preferred Rostropovich, but I started hearing something in Casals. It was amazing how these recordings were changing.
“Of course,” he says, “I was changing, not the recordings.” More and more, he was drawn to “Casals’s unbelievable charisma and personality. If you’re open-minded and let yourself go, he manages to grab you and bring you into his flow and rhythm, and then it becomes totally natural. Quite amazing.”
In 1966 he met Jacqueline du Pré in Moscow, just three years older than him and “a totally unique personality, cellist and musician”. The effect of hearing her play Elgar’s Cello Concerto was to make him vow never to play it himself – he couldn’t imagine doing it either any better or any different. He did later change his mind and even made a recording of the work.
Then he comes to a less well-known musician. "If I had to name one cellist who in a way influenced my way of playing and tone production, which is for me the most important distinction between instrumentalists, more than anyone else it's Natalia Gutman, the young Natalia Gutman, 50, almost 60 years ago." (Maisky turned 73 in January; Gutman is just over five years older.)
“I in a way followed her, the way she played at the time. Then she changed in her own direction. We’re still friends. I admire and adore her though we’re very different. That’s normal. Something about Gutman at that time was totally unique. A certain touch and, tchaaa...” he finds himself lost for words.
It’s the things we value most that we find hardest to express.
