Saying no to the hard sell

Steven Isserlis's personal sound is at odds with the modish 'New York manner'. He knows that bigger isn't better

Steven Isserlis can trace his family tree back to, and beyond, Karl Marx, though actually, he says, he has rather more in common with Harpo. Not the silence, he hastens to add, though that is quickly self- evident. Isserlis likes to talk. Words or notes, the principle's the same. The art of conversation, interaction, dialogue not diatribe - making music is rather like making friends (and Isserlis has made a lot of both): the chemistry's either there or it isn't. And there has to be chemistry. Isserlis will tell you that the words he most hates to hear come from conductors who say, "Don't worry, I'll follow you." But I don't want to be followed, he'll be thinking, I want to make music with you, not in spite of you. And, given the right circumstances, the right collaborators, the right listeners, he does, rather wonderfully.

But back to that family tree for a moment. His grandfather was Julius Isserlis, an eminent Russian composer who moved to Vienna at the turn of the century and enjoyed telling friends about getting kicked out of Beethoven's old apartment by its 102-year-old landlady who mistook him for one of Ludwig's old drinking partners. Isserlis enjoys telling that one almost as much as his grandfather did. The Russian connection is important. It almost certainly accounts for his empathy and subsequent devotion to the Russian orthodoxy of John Tavener's chart-topping The Protecting Veil (when we met, he was enthusing about a new Tavener work for Cello and Russian Orthodox Choir - his idea). And it makes for a rather delicious set of contradictions in his make-up. The natural prankster in him (silly school of Monty Python) knows no discrimination, while his English reserve and good taste are invariably tempered by a healthy streak of Slavic passion. Barbed retorts are as freely, generously, bestowed as hymns of praise. And he'd be the first to admit that he's both self-deprecating and egocentric, embarrassed if he's recognised, insulted if he's not. And so on.

By far the oldest member of the Isserlis family is standing quietly in the room with us as we speak. His age is put at roughly 250, and he is of noble lineage - the house of Guadagnini. A constant companion, rarely, if ever, is he out of Isserlis's sight. He occupies the seat next to him on aeroplanes - the perfect foil for inveterate talkers and a useful meal- ticket should he be extra-hungry ("You did get the order for kosher food for my cello, didn't you?"). Note the sexing of the instrument as male ("Well, how many women do you know whose voice drops to a bottom C?"). But that in itself is a contradiction since Isserlis insists that the cello is a source of many sounds, many voices, from the lowest bass to the highest coloratura - depending on who is playing, and what.

If Isserlis is playing, the qualities one most freely associates with the instrument are indeed wide-ranging. He is a tireless stylist (try his Forgotten Romances disc - Grieg, Liszt, Rubinstein - with kindred spirit Stephen Hough), his warm, concentrated sound (gut strings), outgoing but never overbearing. His is an articulate sound, his facility for coloratura keeping the classical repertoire, in particular, airborne. Most of all, it's personal, a sound that looks into itself, which seeks - and finds - the still centre at the heart of everything.

Which, in this age of the sound-bite and the hard-sell, is not to everyone's taste. Earlier this year, in Los Angeles, his reading of the Elgar Concerto was described by one singularly sour reviewer as "underprojected". Underprojected in what sense? I was there, and this was not the performance I heard. But Isserlis says he gets a lot of that. And all because he doesn't play in "the New York manner". Worryingly, he believes that a whole school of playing is growing up that is tailored to "music as soap opera, not Shakespeare". Audiences, he says, are coming to expect performances that sell rather than serve, with young artists beefing up their sound to compete with some glamorous recording image. "They want Pavarottis of the cello... and sadly none of this has anything to do with music. The Elgar is about regret, looking back, the survival of the human spirit. There is nothing 'in your face' about it."

Could we be seeing here the backlash of a more "public" style of cello playing - the bigger-is-better school - that Mstislav Rostropovich came to typify? Many of his followers assumed the bigness without the betterness. But it's unwise to generalise, and besides, you won't get Isserlis to talk about other cellists and other cellos in front of his own. That, he says, is like talking about other women in front of his wife.

Except Pablo Casals - a god in his pantheon. Isserlis cites his honesty, his simplicity, "his sensitivity, to all kinds of different styles and voices in music. His own personality was incredibly strong, but still you feel the change within every piece, every composer. He understood the 'codes' buried within the music, he instinctively knew how to read between the notes of a score." Isserlis once made comparisons between Casals and two other cellists - one a Baroque specialist, the other,post- Second World War - in the Bach Suites. And it was Casals who came closest to the spirit of the Baroque in projecting the text with life, rhythm, the right sort of elasticity: a feeling of being improvised in the best sense.

In that, he was the guiding spirit that led the Hungarian violinist Sandor Vegh (yes, he's up there in the Isserlis pantheon, too) to found IMS Prussia Cove, an international chamber music seminar housed in the most breathtaking location on the Atlantic coast near Penzance. Isserlis has just assumed the artistic mantle and, as an antidote to the less desirable trends outlined above, he aims to promote (just as Vegh and many other eminent musicians have done) "a very natural view of music-making, one in which exploration of what the music really means is at the heart of the matter".

Isserlis truly believes that we are all inherently musical ("listen to any child sing - it's extraordinary, beautiful"). Well... yes... He also believes that you cannot separate technique from musicality. Now hang on a minute... is he really saying that there is no such thing as a boring musician hiding behind a great technique? I beg to differ - until he explains that by "great technique" he does not mean "digital technique". That's not musical, that's numerical. Point taken.

During the course of his teaching (and this, too, is a sign of the times), Isserlis was shocked to discover that some students could not identify the principal subjects of a sonata: "That's like reading a novel and not knowing who the main characters are. How can you hope to follow a musical narrative without that understanding... it's fundamental..." So, analysis - not as some dry, academic exercise, but as the basis for interpretation - is at the centre of everything that happens down at IMS Prussia Cove. Principal information comes from the score, always, but then you start in on the books, the biographical documentation, the letters, knowing the composer, knowing the person.

Isserlis would love to have known Schumann. He may not have shared his tipple (a caustic mix of beer and champagne), but he would surely have warmed to his generous, giving nature. Schumann is a passion for Isserlis, music that can redefine ecstasy, winging its way on a stream of consciousness that is quite literally out of this world. For some time now he has been leading a crusade for the late works, and to that end has recently embarked upon a film for Channel 4. Again, it's all part of this getting beyond the myths, the popular misconceptions (there are many for whom Beethoven's music will forever be coloured by the scowly bust that sits on Schroeder's piano in the Peanuts cartoons), to the living and loving that fashioned the music.

These days we should be thinking less in terms of Steven Isserlis and more of "Steven Isserlis and Friends". Because he loves to play chamber music, because he needs to play chamber music (because actually all music is chamber music for him, whatever its dimensions). His "friends" or "cronies", most of them celebrities in their own right (we're way beyond the brat- pack stage now), are like-minded and eager to partake. And when Isserlis starts shuffling programmes...

In July, as part of the City of London Festival, he's mounting a three- concert mini-series around the Piano Quintets of Schumann, Dvorak and Elgar. Just imagine the Elgar (and like me, he'll not brook one word of condescension against the great man) with the pianist Stephen Hough, the violinists Joshua Bell and Pamela Frank, and the violist Tabea Zimmerman. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if he's elected to write the programme notes, too - another of his talents. If I'd sent him the transcripts of our conversation, he'd doubtless have written this.

n Steven Isserlis and Friends play the City of London Festival 1, 3, 5 July (Booking: Barbican Box Office, 0171-638 8891)