Steven Isserlis

So Stephen K has left us – such a shock. True, he’d been increasingly frail in recent years, and his friends had been concerned about him; but still – he was so utterly unchanged in terms of personality that the possibility of him dying just didn’t occur to us. Nor to him, I’m pretty sure. My last email from him – in response to a message from me on his birthday (10 days before his death) in which I reiterated how much I’d enjoyed our previous visit, read cheerily: ‘Please come soon again….tomorrow out of hospital….hip replacement…..from 23rd visitable!!!xxx’ Read more…

I tend not to follow music online; but it has been hard to avoid hearing about the ongoing Queen Elisabeth cello competition – especially since I know some of the competitors (or ex-competitors). I have watched some brief extracts – enough to be impressed. Wow – the standard of performance has been amazingly high! And some really strong musical personalities there – cellists of whom we shall hear more in the near future. Read more…

Unbelievable though it may seem, Ralph Kirshbaum’s 80th birthday is today (March 4th). At a time when most people would be either well into retirement, or at the very least seriously contemplating it, Ralph has just expanded his teaching activities at the University of Southern California, and continues to inspire his students (as well as tiring them out!) with his total concentration, his ceaseless flow of ideas and his burning desire to help young musicians fulfil their full potential. Read more…

Now, I know I’ve written about this before, but Facebook posts have a bad habit of sliding quickly into obscurity. And this rant is inspired, as I suspect the previous one on the same subject was, by my annual task of listening to audition tapes for my course at Prussia Cove, Cornwall. Read more…

(I know I’ve written about this before; but every so often – especially listening to unstructured performances – I get the urge to rant about it. If it’s too boring, you’re welcome not to read on!) Read more…

Yet another farewell – this time to someone who was not himself a practising musician, but who was passionate about music, and would, I think, have appreciated being included in what has, alas, become something of a verbal cemetery for musicians. Read more…

Time for a rant – and perhaps one that won’t be to everybody’s taste; but it’s a great relief to be writing again about (a musician’s) life, rather than another farewell – there have been far too many of those recently… Read more…

A personal memoir on his centenary: I first became aware of the genius of Daniil Shafran when I was about 12 years old. My teacher, Jane Cowan, gave a talk about great cellists; towards the end of the evening, she played an excerpt from (I believe) Shafran’s recording of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata with Lydia Pecherskaya. […] Read more…

All my (fairly) recent posts seem to have been obituaries; so I’m delighted to be able to write something celebratory for a change. Paavo Järvi is 60! And – though I don’t want him to read this, because I don’t want it to go to his head – this is a birthday worth celebrating. Read more…

So – another angel from the music world has left us, this time at a ridiculously, tragically young age. Lars Vogt was larger than life in so many ways. He was tall and strongly built – although somehow more cuddly than imposing; his voice was loud, his laugh even louder – often startlingly so, in […] Read more…