Volume 21 Issue 8 - May 2016

CHRISTOPHER DAVY
Beat by Beat | Classical & Beyond
Mischa Maisky
Heart And Soul
PAUL ENNIS
“Maisky’s supercharged style of playing grabs you by the collar. He can be
strong, passionate and powerful – but he can also make love to you with a pianissimo…like
Rostropovich, Maisky’s playing is all about the heart and the soul.”
– Julian Lloyd Webber, The Guardian, January 2012.
Facts you may not know about
Mischa Maisky. Born in Latvia,
educated in the Soviet Union, he
now considers himself a citizen of the
world. (He lives in Belgium, his four
children were each born in different
countries; his cello is Italian, its strings
German, its bow French) He found it
odd that people once referred to him
as a “Russian cellist,” since in the
Soviet Union he wasn’t considered to
be Russian at all. “I was a Jew, which
was made clear in my Soviet passport:
‘Nationality: Jewish.’ Very few people
in the West realize that this is how Jews
were treated in the Soviet Union.”
He is the only cellist to have studied
with both Gregor Piatigorsky and
Mstislav Rostropovich. Two months
before Pablo Casals died, Maisky,
then 25, played the Bach Suite No.2
in D Minor for him in August of 1973,
in an Israeli hotel suite in front of
Casals, his wife Martita, Isaac Stern,
Leonard Rose, Eugene Istomin and
Alexander Schneider. Maisky has
recorded the Bach solo cello suites
three times, most recently for Deutsche
Grammophon in 1999.
In an International Cello Society interview with Tim Janof in 2007,
Maisky expanded on that historic meeting with Casals:
“Perhaps the most frightening thing was to play Bach for him.
[In addition to the second suite, Maisky played the Sonata No.3 in
G Minor BWV1029 with his brother on piano.] Frankly, I was a bit
depressed by his reaction. ‘Young man, I personally don’t think that
what you do has anything to do with Bach. However, you are so
convinced by what you do, that it actually sounds very convincing.’
Isaac Stern calmed me down afterwards during lunch, saying that he
thought I had received the highest compliment a young cellist could
receive from Casals. I now prefer to take what he said as a compliment.
I certainly didn’t play Bach like him, as if anybody could, and
I was never one to imitate anybody, so I’m not surprised by his reaction.
Lately, however, I’ve come to realize just how much I have been
influenced by his recording of the Bach Suites, which I have listened to
repeatedly since I was a teenager.”
Later in the conversation with Janof, Maisky talked about his view
of Bach as a romantic:
“Some people think my Bach is too romantic, which I take as a
compliment. I believe that Bach was one of the greatest romantics
of all times. One shouldn’t forget that in addition to his wonderful
music, he had 20 children. Otto Klemperer was once told that it was
discovered one shouldn’t play Bach with vibrato, to which he replied,
‘Huh? Twenty children and no vibrato?’
“I realize this may seem odd, but I don’t consider Bach’s music to
be baroque. I believe calling Bach a ‘baroque composer’ is an insult to
his genius because he was much, much larger than this. People such
as Bach cannot be categorized so easily and those who try to do so are
diminishing him and his accomplishments, not to mention that such
a label doesn’t begin to capture his essence. In addition to being one of
the great intellects of all time, he was a passionate human being who
I’m sure loved great food and drink. I agree with Pablo Casals when
he said that there is no emotion known to human beings that is not in
Bach’s music. It’s all in there and we just have to dig deep enough to
find and express it.”
Maisky falls clearly into the romantic camp as his Horowitz reference
shows:
“Vladimir Horowitz once said that ‘all music is romantic,’ and
I couldn’t agree more. Playing romantically means playing with
feeling and emotion, and of course people in the 18th century felt
things just as deeply as we do today. I don’t
Mischa Maisky
mean to imply that one should play Bach like
Shostakovich, I’m just saying that Bach was so
far ahead of his time that he’s probably spinning
in his grave as he watches us trying to go
back 300 years. To regress in our approach is
to go against his own mentality and his own
progressiveness. He was such an innovative
and experimental person by nature that he
would be appalled if he were to see how we
argue amongst ourselves about how to play his
music ‘correctly.’”
Later Maisky defends his idea of Bach:
“His music is full of invention and experimentation.
Just look at the last cello suite,
which he wrote for a five-string instrument,
or look at the variety in the Well-Tempered
Clavier. I have no doubt that if somebody
were to give him a modern bow, he would be
thrilled to explore its possibilities. I strongly
disagree with those who insist that Bach must
be played a certain way. There is plenty of room
for different approaches and it’s the variety
of ideas about all sorts of things, not just in
music, that makes life so interesting.”
Before Maisky performed at Roy Thomson
Hall with the Moscow Soloists and Yuri
Bashmet on May 3, 2012, he appeared on
Classical 96.3 FM, where he likened Bach’s
Cello Suites to a great diamond which can shine differently depending
on which way you look at it; he called the study of the suites a neverending
process.
Maisky makes no secret of the fact that he listens to other cellists. At
the time of the Janof interview he had more than 45 recordings of the
Bach Suites, all of which he listened to, some of them several times.
Listening to recordings in general is something he likes to do; listening
to his own recordings gives him a sense of where he’s gone developmentally.
And he likes to hear live music when he can. “I believe very
strongly that one can find something valuable in any performance,
even if I don’t agree with the interpretation or if mistakes are made.”
After studying with Rostropovich for four years (from 18 to 22),
Maisky spent 18 months in a labour camp, “shovelling cement,
building Communism, obviously unsuccessfully,” as he says sarcastically
in an interview from the Verbier Festival in 2012. Then, to avoid
military service, he had a friendly Jewish psychiatrist place him in
a mental hospital for two months, after which he followed his sister
to Israel and “repatriation.” Maisky attributes the curtailment of his
concertizing and other musical activities, as well as the trumped-up
charge that landed him in the labour camp, to his older sister’s move
to Israel in 1969, a move the Soviet authorities were convinced (rightly
as it turned out) Maisky would also make.
When Maisky asked Rostropovich for advice (before he left the
Soviet Union) as to what future musical path to follow, Rostropovich
told him that there are two major cello schools, one Russian and
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