For the ever-growing public of the Jacqueline du Pr Music Building, the annual concert by its patron, Steven Isserlis, is an eagerly anticipated event. (Also, judging from the comments in the interval, among the country's cello-players). Last Sunday, Isserlis played three Beethoven cello sonatas and Schubert's much-loved Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, accompanied by former BBC Young Musician of the Year Sam Haywood.
By chance, Isserlis faced some stiff competition. Those of us "JDP" aficionados who had attended Mayumi Fujikawa's Mozart violin sonata recital the previous evening had our ears still full of music played in the slightly quirky, idiomatic style of yesteryear (think Szigeti, Heifetz) - a style so individual that even intonation (ever so slightly sharp or flat) comes to seem, like ornamentation, part of the player's means of expression.
Isserlis is totally different. The complete modern virtuoso, he is surely incapable of playing a note that isn't completely in tune by the most accurate electronic measurement. But if, in the first half, his playing struck one as elegant but impersonal, that is because both Beethoven's Op.17 transcribed Horn Sonata and the G minor Cello Sonata Op.5 were written to please famous virtuosi - the horn player Giovanni Punto, and, rather more importantly, King Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia (himself a cellist) and his star cello player Jean-Louis Duport, with whom Beethoven performed them.
Given this background, Isserlis performed both with the right dash and brio in the fast movement, and melting tone in the flowing horn melodies of Op.17 and the brief Adagio opening of Op.5. He has also developed the most charming, light tone quality to suggest the short-lived Arpeggione, a sort of bowed guitar, in a work that reminds us of Schubert's lighter songs. By contrast, the powerful final fugue of the fourth work, Beethoven's D major Sonata Op.102, was played by both Isserlis and Haywood with ferocious energy and power.
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