Musical A-team welcome

By WILLIAM DART

Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Stephen Hough are the sort of A-team we rarely see on the concert stage in this country, and Auckland is lucky to have them playing the Town Hall on Saturday night.

Isserlis, one of the world's cello elite, enthuses about their programme of Lowell Liebermann, Schubert, Liszt and Rachmaninov although he admits "one person's perfectly balanced recital might be another person's 'Hmm ... why don't we stay in and watch TV tonight?"' sort of programme.

"It's important for me," he says. "It's a mix of the familiar with the unfamiliar."

Hough is a pianist who goes to some length to search out the unfamiliar and downright quirky. His CDs of York Bowen and Federico Mompou sit alongside his recordings of Schubert and Mendelssohn on my shelves and the pianist's own dazzling Rodgers and Hammerstein transcriptions redefine tongue-in-chic. From Hough's point of view, Saturday's line-up is "intriguing and different enough to be able to make enough connections and not feel the music is chasing about all over the place. Making programmes is a little like furnishing a house. You never know whether that Victorian chair is really going to go with the art deco surroundings."

The two men have been close friends for 14 years ("My son has appointed Stephen his honorary guardian," Isserlis chips in); they met when they were both on the same bill at the 1988 Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

"We both had the same record company at the time," ventures Hough. "Now we have different record companies but the same management."

For Issleris, Hough is "wonderful". "A great pianist with a unique range of colours, a vivid imagination and a deeply personal approach to all the music he plays."

Hough returns his partner's compliment: "Steven has a fine musical intelligence and also a great lyrical warmth. And if chamber music can grow out of a friendship, it makes it so much more fun."

Their independent careers are also phenomenally busy. Isserlis recently established himself as a hip children's author with his book Why Beethoven Threw the Stew and will be working on the sequel on the trip back to England, while Hough is playing Mozart concertos in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.

But it's not Mozart who has made these musicians their names. Hough, in particular, is much known for his various albums of piano miniatures. So it's no surprise to find a short Liszt piece, Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, turning up on Saturday, one of the composer's own transcriptions of an early song.

"I read about this piece years ago," says Issleris, "but it was described as lost. Then Leslie Howard, the Australian pianist, found a copy in Weimar. It's a lovely work - withdrawn, enigmatic, very poignant and it suits the cello beautifully."

Hough, who has given us one of the finest recordings of the composer's B minor Sonata in the past few years, adds "that piece is so hauntingly beautiful, and makes such an expressive use of the cello".

Expect a soulful performance of Rachmaninov's Cello Sonata (Isserlis admits to being "very proud of the fact my grandfather used to play this work with the dedicatee, Brandukov, even though Brandukov infuriated him by flirting with my grandmother"). Expect also to be taken aback, perhaps, by the audience-friendly sonata American composer Lowell Liebermann has written for them.

Hough has recorded Liebermann's concertos and admires the American composer for writing music that is "intellectually rigorous, but which still makes a direct appeal to audiences".

The cellist's considered judgment is that "Liebermann's music is very lyrical, well-written and accessible without being cheap - a rare combination". Hough agrees.

After Auckland they move across the Tasman to Australia where their programmes include a work by the present "bad boy of Australian music" - composer Matthew Hindson. Musica Viva, the Australian equivalent of Chamber Music New Zealand, is celebrating Hindson this year, and six of their visiting artists are including works by the young man in their concerts, including Isserlis and Hough.

Now there's a lead Chamber Music New Zealand might consider following up some time in the near future.

* Steven Isserlis and Stephen Hough play Rachmaninov, Schubert, Liszt and Liebermann in the Auckland Town Hall on Saturday.