Steven Isserlis

Of course this news – conveyed in brief, shocked messages from old Oberlin friends – brought back a flood of memories. I started to ask myself when and how I first met Mikey (as we used to call him); but the answer is – I don’t know. I spent only two years at Oberlin, all I remember is that he suddenly became a major part of my life towards the end of the first year. And when I say ‘became part of my life’, I really mean that. Suddenly he was everywhere: if I was walking back to my dormitory in the evening, I would look around to find him walking beside me; if I were hanging around in the Conservatory lounge (the centre of gossip for us music students – Mikey loved it!) there he would be too; and so on. It was mysterious; but he was like that – once he adopted you as a friend, that was it.

One night towards the end of the semester, he came back to my room, and we talked (as college students will) till 6 or 7 in the morning. Later, I discovered (I think I’m right in saying this) that he considered that conversation as his ‘coming out’ moment. It was certainly quite a talk! It may have been then also that we decided to room together for my second year; and that’s what happened. It was a lively year! Not in the sense of wild parties or whatever – I was always too boring for that (and Michael wasn’t into them either); but just in terms of fun and sparks between us. (There was competition between us, too; but it never became the overriding factor – partly because we were interested in different genders, so that our rivalry was purely in the fields of music and jokes.) Michael’s conversation was generously dolloped with sarcasm – to put it rather mildly. He could, and frequently did, reduce me to tears of laughter; and if he started laughing too, the world would know about it. (It was startling visually as well as aurally, his extraordinary jaw opening wide, the tongue vibrating like a nervous string-player’s.) The noise would echo through the (carpeted!) corridors of our dormitory. One night, around 1.30 am, we got a call from my teacher, Richard Kapuscinski, and his wife Lucy; they were at that point living in the same dormitory, but several floors below us, and right on the opposite side of the huge building; nevertheless, they’d been woken from a deep sleep by Michael’s cackle. (They were annoyed – and at the same time amused.)

I suppose that one could have called Mikey eccentric. Sometimes, for instance, he used to don a little blue hat and take his toy seal (or was it a caterpillar? Or snail? Pretty indeterminate) Pfitzner for a walk down the corridor; perhaps that was a tad unusual. But he was also, of course, a serious musician – very much so. His attitude to his studies was typically atypical: if he liked a teacher, he would attend his or her classes avidly; if he didn’t like them, he would dismiss them utterly. He was not cut out to work in the diplomatic services, it must be admitted. Once we were sitting in the Con lounge when one of his un-favourite teachers came up to him and tried on the sarcastic approach (always a mistake with the absolute master of sarcasm). ‘I am very glad to see you,’ said the teacher pointedly. Mike nodded, staring into space. The teacher complained that Mike hadn’t turned up for the last few weeks of classes; Mike nodded again, still staring at the same point in space. The teacher’s monologue trailed off into awkward silence; he then shuffled away, defeated. I suggested that the exchange might not have helped Mike’s grade level; the only response was a cackle.

Aside from classes, his life at Oberlin was crammed full of music. I could never quite work out how he managed to hear so many concerts; he seemed to attend every student recital, listening critically – but also ready to praise anything he found good. And when he conducted something, it was always an event; we knew that here was a genuine, natural talent that would go far. I still remember him conducting Beethoven’s Egmont overture, opening a concert by the Conservatory orchestra; afterwards, staff members (or a staff member, I forget) took over for the rest of the concert – but it was dwarfed by the Egmont. About an hour after I’d heard the hideous news of Mike’s death, I was rehearsing the Schumann concerto; I suddenly remembered: the first time I’d ever played the piece was with Mike conducting, in a concert of concertos that he put on at Oberlin. He made me learn the work, in fact. Unfortunately, I played badly at that performance, too terrified to do the piece justice on a first outing; but still, it was touching yesterday, and startling, suddenly to remember all the time we’d spent talking about and working on the concerto.

It is just horrible – and unbelievable – to be talking about Mikey in the past tense; how can it be? Of course, having left Oberlin (I before him, in 1978) and gone our separate ways, we had less contact; but we always kept in touch. We also performed the Beethoven Triple concerto in Chicago with Joshua Bell and Jeffrey Kahane in 1990. Later, we met whenever I was In San Francisco or he in London. (Sometimes he would stay with me in London; once he went off with my key, which was a bit of a pain, but at least allowed me to say: ‘Mikey’s gone off with my key’. A friend said that I should actually have paid him to do that!) I was impressed with how he mellowed over the years; it was striking – and probably necessary for his career. (I fear that his sharp tongue had done him little professional good in earlier times; but he couldn’t help it – that was Mikey!) For my 60th birthday, he contributed (at my son Gabriel’s request) a charming document. It was entitled ‘In praise of sidekicks’, though it was a bit unclear who was the sidekick – I think he meant that we were both were. I can’t resist quoting excerpts from it here:

“Consider the great duos of history: Laurel and Hardy, Fry and Laurie, Astaire and Rogers. At their best it was hard to tell who was leading and who was following because it was changing by the moment. Just when you thought you had identified the alpha, it was no longer true. Back and forth and back and forth. Each would push the other to new heights. You could scarcely imagine one without the other…

I find myself, on the occasion of Mr. Isserlis’ 60th birthday, thinking how lucky one is to find a really good sidekick. Sure, you wind up doing things you would never recommend to anyone else. Sure, the outside world looks at you with a heady mixture of admiration and sheer horror. But does anyone else really have to understand? No. At the end of the day do you really care what they think? Not at all.

Your private jokes are hilarious. You annoy all the right people. You are completely comfortable in your ridiculousness…

He has flung open more closet doors than Donatella Versace, and the world is a better place for it.

I was lucky enough to be one of these sidekicks of his along the way, during which time we did and discussed things of deep meaning and staggering pointlessness. But it’s the pointless ones that stick. Such breathtaking heights were reached that world order was changed. This, along with the occasional decent concert, is his great contribution to humanity.”

I couldn’t have been more touched.

The last time we met was in 2019, when he was over in London to conduct the Chineke orchestra; I still regret not having been able to go to the concert – but at least we had a fun dinner the night before. Whenever we met, mellowed or not, there’d still be a lot of cackling to be done. Then I read on Facebook about his kidney transplant and, shocked, wrote to him. Of course when I heard yesterday’s hideous news, I reread our exchange from that time. During the e-conversation, he made some undiplomatic remarks, worthy of the college Mikey, about someone in the music profession; I congratulated him on not having lost his sense of humour through the operation. His response was typical:

“Hair yes humor no. You have of course taken the opposite approach.”

In a later message, he actually said that he was looking forward to my visit to San Francisco next January. That alarmed me a bit; we weren’t normally courteous to one another. I wrote back:

Is your new kidney having strange side effects? Making you polite???????????”

His response was quite enigmatic:

“I can be both the picture of politeness and throw a forest of shade.”

A couple of weeks later I wrote again to say that I hoped he was feeling better. His reply this time is so poignant in retrospect:

“I was, but then this came…….” (Meaning my email – his old self in action again!)

“It’s going pretty smoothly so far. But my friends that have had this say there are usually detours along the way. And what a lip of pills.”

And that, alas, is the last I heard from him. Incredible and terrible. And just when his career was really starting to take off at last, that performance with the San Francisco symphony last month being greeted – as I read on Facebook – with such wild acclaim. It’s devastating. I can only hope that wherever he is now, he’s cackling with delight at the old friends he’s meeting – and getting together orchestras of angels to conduct. Goodbye, Mikey – there will never be anyone like you.