Golden Cello Decade – Steven Isserlis

Steven Isserlis has spent a career rummaging through cellistic attics, and this time he has come back with something genuinely useful — not just another all-Brahms-and-Dvořák sampler, but a snapshot of a single decade when the instrument seemed to be discovering new emotional registers almost simultaneously across Germany, Bohemia, and points beyond.

The Bruch Kol Nidrei, op. 47, that opens the disc needs no introduction, and Isserlis plays it the way he always has — with a kind of tender gravity that never curdles into sentimentality, the opening recitative allowed to breathe without becoming static. Connie Shih’s piano is beautifully weighted underneath him; you notice the bass register especially, dark and resonant without ever thickening into mud. Then, cannily, the disc turns around and gives us Ernst David Wagner’s setting of the same melody, the first number of his Schir Zijon, op. 44 — a modest, almost devotional piece next to Bruch’s more operatic treatment, and fascinating simply for the comparison. Isserlis’s booklet note (he writes wonderfully, digressive and funny in the way of someone who has read everything and remembered most of it) makes the connection explicit. Good programming does that — it makes you hear a famous piece with slightly new ears.

The real discovery, though, is the Le Beau sonata. Luise Adolpha Le Beau has been one of those names you find in Grove and nowhere else — a pupil of Kalliwoda and Rheinberger who also, notoriously, did not get on with Clara Schumann, no small thing given how much power Clara wielded over who got taken seriously in that world. The Cello Sonata in D major, op. 17, dates from 1878, predating Brahms’s Second Cello Sonata by two years, and it wears its Mendelssohnian inheritance openly — lyrical, well-mannered, occasionally surprising you with a harmonic sidestep that suggests she knew her Schumann too, just not personally. Isserlis’s bow arm does something lovely in the first movement, drawing out phrases with an unforced warmth, never pushing the music toward a grandeur it doesn’t want. It is a small piece, well made, and one hopes other cellists steal it now that Isserlis has done the archival heavy lifting.

The big event, structurally, is the Richard Strauss Cello Sonata in F major, op. 6, given here in its rarely heard 1881 original — the version young Strauss more or less disowned, revising the second and third movements before publication and leaving this earlier text to molder until a 2020 critical edition finally freed it. Isserlis recorded the familiar revised version decades ago with Stephen Hough for RCA, and that account remains, in my view, still the primary recommendation — the interpretive instincts sharper, the partnership more simpatico with age (Hough’s pianism has a crystalline wit that suits Strauss’s youthful showing-off). But there’s no reason not to own both. Isserlis and Shih find real vibrancy in the first movement’s overflowing, almost embarrassingly confident lyricism — this is a nineteen-year-old showing us he can already out-Mendelssohn Mendelssohn — and the central Larghetto is where Shih particularly distinguishes herself, her voicing subtle enough that you hear inner lines usually buried. Ensemble is immaculate throughout; these two clearly trust each other. They cut the finale’s exposition repeat, which some will mourn and I do not — the movement’s high spirits don’t need extending.

The Dvořák Four Romantic Pieces, op. 75, arranged by Isserlis himself from the original violin-and-piano version, sound utterly idiomatic on the cello — occasionally you’d swear Dvořák wrote them this way to begin with, though of course he didn’t, and the buoyant folk-inflected charm of the second piece loses nothing in translation. Harpist Olivia Jageurs turns up for the closing rarity, Isaac Nathan’s “Oh! weep for those,” another Isserlis arrangement, and its modal melancholy — Nathan set Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, remember, so the material has real historical pedigree — makes an unexpectedly moving envoi.

Hyperion’s engineering, done at Henry Wood Hall, gives Isserlis’s cello a burnished, room-filling presence without artificial spotlighting; you hear rosin dust practically settling. This is not a disc that will replace anyone’s primary library choices in the standard repertoire, but as a piece of cellistic archaeology — intelligent, beautifully played, and genuinely illuminating about a decade we thought we already knew — it earns its place.