Steven Isserlis
Music helped Steven Isserlis cope with the death of his wife. Now he has a new partner and a huge challenge, says Elizabeth Grice
Why I am ready for the cello’s biggest challenge
On the Richter scale of concert nerves, the celebrated cellist Steven Isserlis is registering dangerously high. He puts his head in his hands at the thought of the folly he’s about to commit and a tumble of iron-grey curls falls over his features. Worn down by years of persuasion, he is about to make an assault on the cello player’s equivalent of Everest – performing live, and from memory, Bach’s enigmatic six Cello Suites. It’s a feat often likened to playing Hamlet or Lear.
“All the clichés are true,” he groans, emerging from his mop. “I make no secret of the fact that I’m going to be terrified. I haven’t performed the cycle live for 10 or 11 years, and it’s a scary thing to do because you don’t want to let down this incredible, perfect music. I have the perfect cello [a 1726 Stradivarius] and the perfect bow and I’ll be playing in the perfect hall [London’s Wigmore Hall], so everything bad is going to be from me.”
At 57, Isserlis is one of the top cellists in the world, up there in the stratosphere of solo excellence with the Chinese-American Yo-Yo Ma. He gives masterclasses, writes on music and is constantly sleuthing to bring lost or forgotten cello pieces to light. On stage, his intensity, his technical mastery and the sensual relationship with his cello, are thrilling.
But he is notoriously self-critical and more prone than most musicians to neuroses. “I get hugely nervous, especially about memory,” he says. “The demands on the performer are immense. You are playing by yourself. You are the heart, the melody. There is no one else to blame. Yet I wouldn’t want to get rid of nerves completely because one thing I haven’t become yet is blasé in concert.
“You do see people who have been playing too long and they’ve got into a routine. I don’t want that to happen.”
His calming ritual before a concert is always the same: “I like to rehearse in the morning, have a huge lunch, get up, drink coffee and listen to The Beatles. It’s partly superstition – but my father was Russian so I was brought up with superstition.”
At his first public performance of the Bach Cello Suites some years ago, he was too scared to play without the musical score, but when his pageturner kept making mistakes he was forced to rely on memory. “It was very good for me. I actually thanked him afterwards.” (His disc of the six suites which his father, aged 92, had begged him to make, is one of the great cello recordings.)
Isserlis is coolly admiring of Yo-Yo Ma’s rendering of the works in one three-hour sitting at the Proms last year. “I wouldn’t want to do that,” he says. “You need nerves of steel. I would be terrified out of my wits. It’s great that he can do it, but I would rather take time over it, or at least do it in one day.”
He does not consider Ma a rival (“our careers and our musical approach are so different”), and even credits him with having been an inspiration when, aged 19, he heard him play a Locatelli sonata at the Wigmore Hall. “My God, I thought. I’ve got to up my game. It was so perfect. I played it, but never as accurately as that.”
For the tour, beginning in Oxford on Friday and moving to the Wigmore Hall on February 17, Isserlis will intersperse the Bach dance suites with music by his old friend, the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, to celebrate his 90th birthday. “He is a bit of a father figure to me, but he is a hard taskmaster. He wants every note right.”
Steven Isserlis’s musical destiny was surely decided long ago. He is distantly related to Felix Mendelssohn. His grandfather was the Russian pianist and composer Julius Isserlis, one of 12 eminent musicians allowed abroad by Lenin after the Russian Revolution. With the rise of Nazism, the Jewish family fled Vienna for London in 1938. Steven was born in Barnes and brought up in Roehampton, his father a keen amateur violinist, his mother a piano teacher. His two sisters are both talented musicians – Annette a viola player and arranger and Rachel a violinist.
“I am the baby, the only boy, the spoiled brat. I realised I wasn’t any good at anything else, so playing the cello became an attractive option,” he says dryly.
One of his most powerful childhood memories is being taken by his father to hear Mstislav Rostropovich at the Royal Festival Hall in London. “The huge sound he made”, Isserlis recalled later, “the way he leapt around the cello like a bullfighter taming a dangerous beast, took us to a new level of excitement.” Aged 15, Isserlis played to Rostropovich as he was having breakfast. “He said I should practise eight hours a day and I’m very glad I ignored him. If I had gone down that route I would not be playing the cello today. It would have killed me.”
The music room of his house in South Hampstead is wallpapered with pictures of his favourite composers (Robert Schumann is his obsession), and dominated by the big, quiet presence of his cello. Cellos, to Isserlis, have souls rather than characteristics. He says of the Marquis de Coberon Stradivarius he will use on tour: “It’s just gorgeous, rich but poetic. It’s a dream cello. The Royal Academy of Music says it’s on a 10-year loan, but I say it’s a loan for life because if they take it away from me, I’ll kill myself. I would be heartbroken without it.”
Isserlis has never taken more than three consecutive days away from the cello since he was 10 – once when his son Gabriel – now 26 and a hobby cellist – was born and once when he decided to have a holiday. “I miss it. It’s like breathing for me.”
Music was cathartic after his wife Pauline Mara, a flute teacher, died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 62. “I played immediately afterwards”, he said at the time. “It was the best way, better than sitting at home moping. I’m lucky. I have an outlet.” They had been together for 28 years, the final three marred by desperate remedies peddled by “holistic” doctors and the illusory hope of a cure. In a moving article in The Daily Telegraph, Isserlis urged others to beware the false promises of “alternative practitioners”.
Today he says he is out of the darkness. “My son [who had urged his father not to be ‘gloomy’] is wonderful, and my girlfriend is wonderful. Touch wood, I am in a very good place.”
He met Joanna Bergin (of German parentage; raised in Buenos Aires) at a dinner party – to which he had uncharacteristically invited himself after a concert. “Singing is her passion,” he says, “but she is many other things: model, photographer, actress, journalist. She has her projects and I have mine.” Isserlis is abroad for eight months of the year, which he admits is testing for a relationship. Sometimes she travels with him, sometimes photographs musicians for his albums. She took the last photographs of the composer Sir John Tavener, Isserlis’s great friend who died in 2013.
It was through giving the first performance of Tavener’s cello concerto The Protecting Veil in 1989 that Isserlis began to make a stir. His career until then had been slow to take off. These days, he is booked two years ahead in major concert halls all over the world, and he has friends in almost every city. “It is a comfort to me, because I had so little for a long time.”
One of his passions is nurturing young classical fans. For his son Gabriel he wrote two books that became popular: Why Beethoven Threw
the Stew and Why Handel Waggled his Wig. He has also written three stories set to music by the composer Anne Dudley: Goldipegs and the Three Cellos, Cindercella and Little Red Violin, with the cello as a repentant wolf.
His next book is an updating of Schumann’s 70 precepts for young musicians, with some of his own added. “The most exciting thing for me is to have my name next to Schumann’s as co-author. I like that. He and Harpo Marx are my two greatest heroes in history.”
‘I wasn’t good at anything else – so playing the cello was an attractive option’