Steven Isserlis

Steven Isserlis

Steven Isserlis is picky about who he collaborates with ('I don't really like doing chamber music concerts with people I don't know') and uncompromising when it comes to recording ('If I'm going to do the Bach Suites I'm going to do them under ideal circumstances or I'm not going to do them at all'). But even when you're 48 and one of the best cellists in the world, sometimes it's still impossible to say no to your father.

'My father told me to, basically,' is the explanation for his decision to tackle the Bach Cello Suites on disc, set to be released on Hyperion in May. 'A few things came together. I got an offer from a label, and then I also got an offer from a big series in Madrid to play them at around the same time. But the main reason by far was that my father, who is now 89, said, "I really want you to record the Bach Suites. Please record the Bach Suites."'

Without the input from his father - the son of great Russian pianist and composer Julius Isserlis - it seems likely that he might never have completed the project, so daunted does he still seem by the whole affair: 'I've just heard the first edits.

The producer was great, the engineer was wonderful, the venue was great, the cello was amazing, the bows were fantastic, the music's the greatest - so the only thing that can be bad is me.'

'what I've tried to do with the Bach is to scrape everything away and let it speak for itself, and that's very hard.'

His preparation for the Bach coincided with learning a challenging new score by German avant-garde composer Wolfgang Rihm, which he premiered at the Salzburg Festival last year. But it was the Bach that really got Isserlis' brow furrowed: 'Even though the Rihm was at the top of the cello, triple forte, octave leaps, once you've learnt it you've learnt it, and that's fine. But what I've tried to do with the Bach is to scrape everything away and let it speak for itself, and that's very hard.'

Isserlis started his cellistic journey at the age of 10, when he began taking lessons with Jane Cowall in Ladbroke Grove. His father is an amateur violinist, his mother was a pianist and his two older sisters play period violin and viola, so he decided to take up an instrument still missing in his family. 'Music was like a language - we all played it,' he says. 'It's the same for our children - my son and my two nieces. It doesn't occur to them not to play music.'

In his late teens he made the journey to the US, intending to study with Gregor Piatigorsky but eventually opting to enrol at Oberlin College after the great Russian cellist died unexpectedly. He completed only two years of the five-year double degree, pulling out for financial reasons: 'I don't have any degrees. Nothing to prove anything,' he smiles.

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