Steven Isserlis has been busy teaching, writing and studying Bach during the lockdown, explained the Radio 3 announcer. He hasn’t risked a Covid cut, that’s for certain. Yet, judging from his playing at this Wigmore concert, the celebrated cellist was feeling like a musical prisoner savouring his first day of freedom. Everything about his recital with the pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen spoke of a performer carried away by a reunion with his instrument and his art.
Even those who were only listening to the BBC rather than watching on YouTube or via the Wigmore website must have caught the beatific smiles that accompanied Isserlis’s joyful playing of Beethoven’s first cello sonata, Op 5 No 1. Back when concerts were commonplace, Isserlis played this sonata very finely in this same hall last September. This time, though, the exuberance was up another notch. It was as if Isserlis was discovering the cello’s expressive range all over again, from its long singing lines to its orgiastic gruffness.
Isserlis is one of the concert platform’s great emoters, and he seemed at times perilously close to falling off his chair as he lived every bar of Fauré’s first cello sonata in D minor. It was, nevertheless, an ideal work for such a special occasion, a true journey from darkness to light, with playing of lustrous tonal subtlety. Schumann’s three Romances Op 94, played in between the two sonatas, found both Isserlis and Rushdie Momen in more reflective mood, with delicately matched interplay between piano and cello and nothing overstated. There was no emoting, either, in a simple yet concentrated encore, Isserlis’s own transcription of Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ.
• Available to listen on BBC Sounds and watch on the Wigmore Hall’s website. The Wigmore Hall lunchtime series continues until 26 June.
