Andrew Johnstonereviews cellist Steven Isserlis who was guest of the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the NCH.
British-born cellist Steven Isserlis is noted not only as a top international soloist, but also as an eminent chamber musician and a successful children's author.
As guest of the Irish Chamber Orchestra this week, he combined the first of these roles with the less familiar one of director. The three works were all by Haydn, each one in D major and each one a treasure, symphonies from opposite ends of the long list (Nos 13 and 104) framing the later of the two surviving cello concertos.
Isserlis played the orchestral cello part in the purely symphonic movements, sitting with his back to the audience and encouraging the orchestra through gesticulations of head, body and bow. Since he's such an ardent performer, these signals could be reactive as well as proactive. The successes of this unconventional arrangement were thus less of a technical than of a spiritual kind.
In Symphony No 104, the double-dotted opening and the minuet both began indecisively, yet when movements got off on the right footing - as the Andante in particular did - there was nothing to inhibit the music's joie de vivre.
The interpretation, then, resulted less from applying fastidious performing principles than from sheer enlightened enjoyment.
For the concerto - and for the concerto-type Adagio cantabile that Haydn sneaked into Symphony No 13 - the orchestral management was judiciously carried out by the ICO's leader, Katherine Hunka.
To the orchestra's discreet yet assured accompaniment, and now facing the audience, Isserlis abandoned himself to solo playing which was fantastical sometimes to the point of waywardness, but which never faltered in soul or in sweetness of sound.
