Britain’s greatest cellist on the power of dreams
World-leading cellist Steven Isserlis talks to Ben Lawrence about music, death and how a celebrated playwright invoked his wrath
Ayear after the composer John Tavener died in 2013, he visited Steven Isserlis in a dream. “It was terribly vivid,” recalls the cellist. “I don’t normally believe in this sort of thing, but John appeared to me one night and said, ‘You’ve got to find my last completed work and arrange it for cello.’ So I asked, ‘Do you mean the Dante piece?’ and John said, ‘No, no, no. The piece after that’.”
The next day Isserlis phoned Tavener’s widow, Maryanna, who confirmed that there had been a work called It is Finished (“Typical John, theatrical to the end”), but that it wasn’t for cello. That, thought Isserlis, was that, until he met Tavener’s publisher, James Rushton, a few weeks later. Rushton confirmed that there was a piece after It is Finished that had been arranged for eight cellos. He is looking into getting it performed.
Isserlis, a down-to-earth sort of person, relates this without any embellishment.
“It’s extraordinary,” he says, “but John believed in dreams, you see. He said he dreamed a lot of his music. A lot of what he did in his public life he did for effect, and I would tease him mercilessly about that. But he would never lie.”
Tavener’s music does have a dreamlike quality, and Isserlis is indelibly linked to Tavener’s crossover hit, The Protecting Veil. It was composed in 1989, when Isserlis was a struggling cellist “spending six pounds a week on food”. Its ability to provoke deep meditation in the listener while letting its emotional heart bubble close to the surface won it a place on the Mercury Prize shortlist.
“I think it struck a chord with people because it was just very, very beautiful,” he says.
I meet Isserlis, 58, in an Italian restaurant near the home in South Hampstead he shares with his girlfriend, Joanna. With his mop of curls and rather poetic face, he looks much the same as he did when he arrived on the scene in a blaze of virtuosic brilliance nearly 30 years ago. Without doubt, if he can unearth Tavener’s final work successfully, it will be a major classical event.
Isserlis is considered one of the world’s greatest cellists (as well as a well-respected teacher and author of several children’s books). His playing combines a sort of dancing energy with a muscular spirituality, and his repertoire is wide-ranging – embracing Baroque, Romantic and 20th-century compositions – and yet, he is acutely self-critical. He has bad dreams about performing, and combats this partly by playing only pieces he admires: “Of course I am only going to play pieces I love, otherwise how am I going to convince the audience to love it?”
What doesn’t he love? “I’ve never seen the point of [Ravel’s] Boléro. I find it boring. And I’ve probably had enough of Pachelbel’s Canon.”
Next week, Isserlis will perform at the Aldeburgh Festival in a mixed programme that includes works by Schumann, Adès, Britten and Britten’s teacher, Frank Bridge.
“Bridge is the most underrated British composer,” he says. “He doesn’t write necessarily great tunes, he’s not as obviously appealing as Elgar, but his Oration for Cello and Orchestra is one of his masterpieces. It takes you onto the battlefield, and it’s tough and uncompromising. The first movement was written in 1913, and is very different, with singable melodies. Then it becomes modernistic and phantasmagorical. He was so traumatised by the horror of war that he couldn’t sleep and would walk the streets of London all night long, composing as he did so.”
Isserlis grew up in Roehampton, south-west London. A clever child, he passed his O-levels at 14 and moved to Scotland at 16 to study the cello. His was a musical family – his mother taught the piano and his father, who lectured in metals finishing at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, was an amateur violinist. Most intriguing is the story of his grandfather, Julius Isserlis, who was one of 12 Russian musicians (including Rachmaninov) chosen by Lenin in 1922 to tour Europe.
“They were allowed to travel abroad for six months with their families to spread the word of the cultural riches of the Soviet Union,” says Isserlis. “It was a great idea, except not one of them returned, as my father used to report with great glee. My grandfather was in Vienna until 1938 and, luckily, was invited to take his first British tour in the week of the Anschluss.”
Isserlis never got to know his grandfather properly. Julius died when Steven was nine, after a life spent in a dingy flat with his wife in Holland Park. Letters, however, revealed a kind, unworldly man who would play Chopin on the piano while Steven’s eldest sister danced. Isserlis feels upset at the way in which he was represented in Mona Golabek’s play, The Pianist of Willesden Lane. It received its UK premiere in London in 2016 and relates the story of Golabek’s mother who, as a young Jewish girl growing up at the time of the Holocaust, was determined to make it as a concert pianist.
“There is a scene in which her [Golabek’s] mother was studying with my grandfather – although she [Golabek] doesn’t spell his name right – and he says, ‘I am sorry. I am not a brave man. I can’t teach you any more.’
“Well, that’s rubbish. My grandfather was Jewish and so would have been allowed to teach other Jews. And when the Anschluss was announced, apparently my
John appeared and said, ‘You have to find my last work.’ I said, ‘Do you mean the Dante piece?’ He said, ‘No’
grandmother burst into the room and said, ‘The Nazis have arrived in Vienna.’ My grandfather, who was giving a lesson, turned to her and said, ‘Rita, let’s talk about it when I’ve finished.’ He was completely unruffled. He was a wonderful and brave man and, in fact, he saved several Jewish students’ lives by finding them sponsors in the UK.”
This is the only time I see Isserlis agitated. What I initially mistook for academic detachment is something more numinous, something bound up in the power of music. Indeed, music must have provided much comfort to Isserlis after his wife, Pauline Mara, a flute teacher with whom he had a son, Gabriel, died of cancer in 2010.
“Music is it. At all times of tragedy and happiness, it is what you need. Great composers become your friends when you’re young and they remain your friends for life. My girlfriend’s mother says that Beethoven has the greatest spirit of any human being, and I think that’s right.”
Steven Isserlis performs at the Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk, on Monday at 7.30pm. Tickets: 01728 687110; snapemaltings.co.uk