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Steven John Isserlis (born 19 December 1958) is a British people cellist. An acclaimed soloist, chamber musician, educator, writer and broadcaster, he is widely regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation. He is also noted for his diverse repertoire and distinctive sound which is partly from his use of catgut.
Isserlis has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award in 1993, the Robert Schumann Prize of the City of Zwickau in 2000, and both the Wigmore Hall and Glashütte Original Music Festival Award in 2017. His recordings have garnered two Gramophone Awards, a Classical BRIT Award, a BBC Music Magazine Award, and two Grammy Award nominations among others. He is also one of the only two living cellists inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.
Isserlis currently plays on the 1726 Marquis de Corberon cello made by Antonio Stradivari on loan from the Royal Academy of Music.
On the Midweek programme in January 2014, Isserlis dislcosed that on arrival in Vienna in 1922, his pianist grandfather and father found a flat, but the 102-year-old landlady refused to take in a musician, because her aunt had a previous musician tenant who was noisy and would spit on the floor—this tenant was Ludwig van Beethoven.
Isserlis went to the City of London School, which he left at the age of 14 to move to Scotland to study under the tutelage of Jane Cowan. From 1976 to 1978 Isserlis studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Richard Kapuscinski. Ever since his youth Daniil Shafran has been his cello hero, and Isserlis has described how "his vibrato, his phrasing, his rhythm all belonged to a unique whole... he was incapable of playing one note insincerely; his music spoke from the soul."
The name Isserlis is one of many European variants of the Hebrew name 'Israel'.Hanks & Hodges 'A Dictionary of Surnames' (Oxford, 1988).
Since then, Isserlis has had an active solo career and regularly appears with many of the world's leading ensembles. He has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. He has also curated concert series for Wigmore Hall, 92nd Street Y in New York and the Salzburg Festival.
Isserlis is an advocate per of historical performance practices and frequently performs with period instrument orchestras. He has performed Beethoven with Fortepiano Robert Levin in Boston and London, and Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Simon Rattle. He has also published several editions and arrangements, principally for Faber Music and was an advisor on new editions of Beethoven's cello works, as well as the concertos of Dvořák and Edward Elgar.
In contemporary music, Isserlis has premiered works by composers John Tavener, Lowell Liebermann, Carl Vine, David Matthews, John Woolrich, Wolfgang Rihm, Mikhail Pletnev and Thomas Adès. He also commissioned a new completion of Sergei Prokofiev Cello Concertino from the Udmurtia musicologist Vladimir Blok, which was premiered in 1997 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Mark Wigglesworth.
Isserlis has presented a number of festivals with long-term collaborators such as Joshua Bell, Stephen Hough, Mikhail Pletnev, András Schiff, Dénes Várjon, Olli Mustonen, Tabea Zimmermann, and actors Barry Humphries and Simon Callow. He is artistic director of the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove in West Cornwall, where he both performs and teaches.
He is also a part-owner of a Domenico Montagnana cello from 1740 and a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini cello from 1745, which he played exclusively from 1979 to 1998. He has also performed on the De Munck-Feuermann Stradivarius owned by the Nippon Music Foundation.
In September 2016, Isserlis's book for young musicians, Robert Schumann's Advice to Young Musicians Revisited by Steven Isserlis, was published by Faber & Faber.
In October 2021, Faber & Faber published Isserlis's book The Bach Cello Suites – A Companion, a volume entirely devoted to the history and music of Bach's Suites for unaccompanied cello.
In 2017, Isserlis's recording of Haydn's Cello Concertos was nominated for a Grammy Award.
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