Music that Changed Me
Cellist
Steven Isserlis is one of the world’s greatest cellists, both as a concerto soloist and as a chamber player. He broadcasts, writes children’s books and tweets regularly on the great composers. No Longer Mourn for Me, his new recording with the Philharmonia and Omer Weir Welber, features late works by his long-time collaborator and friend John Tavener and is released by Hyperion Records on 30 October.
My mother taught the piano, my father was a keen amateur violinist, my sisters played viola and violin and I started learning the cello at six (also, our dog sang), so my family home was always full of music.
But, from a different musical world, I still remember the excitement when, on my fifth birthday, my Great Aunt Esme gave me a record holder containing a single of THE BEATLES’ ‘She Loves You’. I listened to it constantly on my little portable record player. Later, I played my sister Annette’s arrangements of Beatles songs to Paul Mccartney; one of the great days of my life – Paul joined in on drums!
My teacher Jane Cowan was giving a talk on great cellists and I was bowled over by the sound of the Russian cellist Daniil Shafran. I couldn’t get hold of his records until my father, the son of Russian pianist and composer Julius Isserlis, asked a visiting colleague from the Soviet Union to send me some when she went home. The first one she managed to send included TCHAIKOVSKY’S ‘Mélodie’, from Souvenir d’un lieu cher. I was entranced by Shafran’s gloriously natural phrasing, and the ease of his playing enthralled me… a Russian folk singer cellist! Shafran is still a big influence on me; for instance, on my recordings of the Kabalevsky Sonata and the Prokofiev Concerto, anyone who knows his playing will hear his influence.
In my late teens I haunted Henry Stave’s classical record shop in Dean Street; one day I came across a 99p record of FAURÉ’S Tantum Ergo, sung by the Chorale Gabriel Fauré. It wasn’t a particularly polished performance, but I fell in love with the way they sang; it was so radiant and touching. My teacher was a Fauré nut, but it took me years to fall in love with some of Fauré’s late music. Now I think his sonatas are the greatest 20th-century cello sonatas and I can never play them enough, particularly with pianist Connie Shih. We have recorded an album of Proust-related music for BIS Records and I’m (hopefully) directing a Proust celebration at Wigmore Hall in November which will, of course, include Fauré.
SCHUMANN’S Third Symphony, the ‘Rhenish’, was the first of his I got to know. My late wife Pauline and I used to listen to it in the car. It gave me such energy, like musical caffeine. I remember making my first recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto with Richard Hickox: I hadn’t slept the night before, but as we drove there, we put on the ‘Rhenish’ and I felt better.
I’ve played Schumann’s Cello Concerto countless times but I still love to work on it. Like Fauré, Schumann is close to my heart. He is a composer of dreams.
I first heard JS BACH’S St Matthew Passion as a young man, in a little cathedral in Wales, and despite the shortcomings of the amateur performance I was bowled over. Years later, I was artistin-residence at the Cheltenham Festival under Michael Berkeley and we organised a performance of the St Matthew Passion with an orchestra made up of my friends and relatives, Joshua Bell as the leader, conducted by Colin Davis and with Mark Padmore as the Evangelist. It was a dream come true, although it caused controversy as it overran drastically – Colin Davis’s speeds were not the fastest!
Of course, the music of John Tavener has played a big part in my life ever since The Protecting Veil; John went on to write many pieces for me. I have just been recording some of his late works, which are revelatory. The music is gorgeous and very varied: it includes a hypnotic, improvisatory piece for Sufi singer and cello, and my arrangement for eight cellos of his very last work, Preces and Responses. Working on these recordings really brought him back to me.