Sublime encore rounds off a sumptuous lunchtime treat
The treasurable cellist looks more and more like a tousle-haired saint
Every weekday now, just when the charm of homeworking is wearing thin and the urge to skim Twitter becomes overwhelming, along comes the Wigmore Hall’s lunchtime series to refresh the spirits.
Monday’s was especially fine. It featured that treasurable cellist Steven Isserlis, in a cleverly balanced programme that sandwiched Schumann’s dreamy Three Romances between hefty masterworks from Beethoven and Fauré.
Isserlis looks more and more like a venerable tousle-haired saint from a Renaissance altarpiece, gazing upwards to heaven as he coaxes that special Isserlis tone of husky intimacy from his cello. His accompanist Mishka Rushdie Momen was, by contrast, completely inscrutable, but in fact she was every bit as expressive and intelligent as he.
In the first piece, Beethoven’s early and self-consciously flashy first Cello Sonata, both players had to leap straight into flamboyantly virtuoso mode. Isserlis flung out his show-off octaves with aplomb, and Momen strutted her stuff in Beethoven’s scales and arpeggios. But they were also attuned to the lofty spaciousness of the introduction, and those later moments in the first movement where a mood of inwardness steals over the music. “Innig” – “inward” – is the quality Schumann specifically asks for in the second of his Three Romances, which came next. He also marks the piece “einfach” – “simple” – and the combination of folk-like simplicity and romantic introversion is very hard to bring off. But these two managed it wonderfully, making it seem as if the piece were really a song in disguise. That was even truer of the third piece, which felt like a poetic effusion in notes.
Then came the toughest proposition, the first cello sonata by Gabriel Fauré. As Isserlis said in his pre-performance chat, it’s a puzzling piece, at times modernist, at times romantic, with sometimes an antique note of old French music. I’ve heard performances that felt shapeless and turbid, but this one was completely convincing. Surprisingly, given the never-ending surge of ideas, the aftertaste was of something disciplined and severe. One could feel the hard bones of the music under the romantic soft flesh.
Impressive though this was, it was good to be left with the sublime simplicity of the encore, Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir (I cry unto thee), in Isserlis’s own arrangement. The way Momen shaped the winding middle part, sometimes pushing it forward, sometimes letting it fall into the background, was actually the most moving part of an altogether wonderful concert.
See and hear this concert at wigmorehall.org.uk and listen on BBC Sounds via the BBC Radio 3 website for 30 days