When Steven Isserlis realised his two-concert survey of the Bach Cello Suites would coincide with his friend György Kurtág’s 90th birthday, he decided to bring in some of the composer’s pieces between the suites. As anyone who has heard Kurtág’s affectionately quirky Bach arrangements for piano duet might have predicted, it was a perfect fit. There can have been no more than eight minutes of Kurtág all told in the first of the concerts – five pieces, all taken from his ever-expanding Signs, Games and Messages. Yet these distilled moments of music enabled us to listen to the Bach a little differently.
Bach-wise, the programme found Isserlis travelling from the stable positivity of the Suite No 1, through the darkness of the C minor Suite No 5, and out via the joyous Suite No 4 to end with a rumbustious Gigue. In each suite, Isserlis lent the faster movements a ringing, dancing energy – but it was the Sarabande, the slow movement, that was the centre of gravity. In the Suite No 5, the Sarabande was veiled, inscrutable and almost abstract; this movement, more than anywhere else, seemed to be where Isserlis found Bach and Kurtág at their closest.
In between Suites 1 and 4 came Kurtág’s Hommage à John Cage, and a new yet familiar voice was talking to us from Isserlis’s cello, half lilting, half stuttering. Pilinszky János: Gérard de Nerval wavered in intensity as Isserlis was thrown by a particularly loud cougher, but Jelek (Games) 1 and 2, after the interval, were irrepressible, Jelek 1 ending in a cat-fight screech that slid right up the instrument. Leading into the sunlight of Bach’s Suite No 4, Kurtág’s Faith traced a momentous journey from passion to peace in three minutes flat.
- At Wigmore Hall, London, on 24 February. Box office: 020-7935 2141.
