Classic Cellists at the BBC

For over 60 years, BBC Television has been filming many of the world's greatest cellists.

Jacqueline du Pre, Yo-Yo Ma

Mstislav Rostropovich, Paul Tortelier

and Mischa Maisky

are amongst those we'll see in the studio and on the stage.

This programme is a look at

some of the extraordinary gems in the BBC archive -

my Classic Cellists at the BBC.

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The final moments of Elgar's Cello Concerto,

which I played there in 1987, conducted by Sir Yehudi Menuhin,

a musical experience that I will never forget.

I love the cello and I love cellists.

And many of my favourites have appeared on the BBC,

few more often than the great Paul Tortelier.

Paul Tortelier simply oozed Gallic charm.

Just listen to the way he

captures the spirit of this little piece by Weber.

More than 60 years later, the 17-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason

won the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition.

Sheku's definitely one for the future.

And here he is, accompanied by his sister, Isata.

SHE SINGS ALONG

When I was around 11, my father suddenly announced

one morning that there was something that evening on the radio that,

as a budding young cellist, I should definitely hear.

It turned out to be a performance from the BBC Proms

by a young girl called Jacqueline du Pre.

And I've never forgotten the intensity of that sound.

Jackie was just 17,

and the same year, the BBC invited her into the studio

to record a programme of short pieces with her mother at the piano.

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In 1968, just four years before she was cruelly afflicted

by multiple sclerosis, BBC cameras were on hand to record

Jacqueline du Pre performing in extraordinary circumstances.

The previous week, the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia, and Jackie,

together with her future husband, Daniel Barenboim,

announced that they would perform the Cello Concerto

by Czechoslovakia's most famous composer, Antonin Dvorak.

We join Jackie at the end of the final movement.

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Until the 20th century,

solo cellists were very few and far between.

The musician who changed all of that was Pablo Casals.

Casals transformed the way the cello was played.

Back in the 19th century, young cellists were taught

to practise with a book under their arm, a bit like this,

under their left arm. Of course, incredibly awkward

and incredibly stiff.

Now, Casals refused to do this and by doing so

actually revolutionised cello technique

making the whole process of playing the cello natural and more fluent.

There's one piece of film which demonstrates this fluency perfectly.

It's one of his legendary performances

of a Bach Cello Suite broadcast as part of the BBC's Omnibus series.

You can see how Casals' flowing technique allows the piece

to build effortlessly as the music progresses.

Following the example of Casals, the Bach Suites came to be

regarded as the absolute peak of the cello repertoire.

And the music you've just heard was actually the very first piece

that our next classic cellist learnt to play.

If you listen to it carefully, it's a very simple song.

# Doo-do-doo-do-doo-do-do. #

And it doesn't require a tremendous amount of technique.

But it's actually, you cross strings and you use one finger.

And I had a teacher, which was my father, who said, you know,

you could learn this in a day, which you can, for first two bars

and then, the next day you add another finger

and then it's the same pattern.

So, in fact, a lot of music, all of music,

and a lot of Bach is all about pattern recognition.

You know, when you see a pattern, when is it the same?

When is it different and how different is it?

Here's Yo Yo at the halfway point of his marathon recital

of all six Bach Suites back-to-back at the BBC Proms in 2015.

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I think perhaps sometimes people don't realise what an incredible

range of pitch the cello's got.

Right from its bottom open C string...

HE PLAYS C STRING

Beautiful, sonorous sound that on a nice cello like this

will just go on ringing...

right up to the top.

HE PLAYS A HARMONIC

Like that. It just floats away.

In fact, the cello's range of pitch

is almost certainly the closest of any instrument to the human voice,

which means that hearing a cello played beautifully

is like hearing someone sing.

Schumann's Cello Concerto was written when

he was 40, shortly after he had arrived to take up the appointment

of conductor to the orchestra in Dusseldorf in his beloved Rhineland.

The concerto is in three movements which are played without a break.

Tonight's soloist is the distinguished French cellist

Andre Navarra and here he is now.

Navarra was well known as the teacher but

he was rarely filmed in concert.

Here, he plays the Schumann Concerto with the Halle Orchestra

conducted by Sir John Barbirolli.

We join him with his own cadenza in the final movement.

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One of my closest cellist friends is Steven Isserlis

who has an extraordinarily varied repertoire.

From Vaughan Williams at the Proms,

to Sir John Taverner's The Protecting Veil,

and to exquisite chamber music.

I've known Steven for many years - he even came to my wedding.

He has an incredibly individual style of playing and I think

he's had a very individual approach to his career.

Steven's an expert in Beethoven.

Watch out for his skilful interplay with pianist Peter Evans

in the opening movement of the Fourth Sonata.

One of the most memorable experiences of my life

was when I first heard the great Russian cellist

Mstislav Rostropovich perform live in concert.

I just couldn't understand some of the things

that he did on the cello.

And years later,

I got an opportunity to interview him for a national UK

newspaper and one of the questions I asked was, "You know, I would

"watch you and couldn't understand some of the things you were doing.

"How did you do them?" And he said, "I couldn't understand either."

Without Rostropovich, much of the more recent music for cello

simply wouldn't exist.

Many composers wrote pieces for him and in 1960 Shostakovich arrived

in London to hear the cello Concerto he'd written for his friend.

In this rare archive we can see

Rostropovich's amazing technique as the rehearsals get underway.

Rostropovitch was all about commitment and concentration

even when he wasn't playing.

A year later, Rostropovitch was invited by the BBC to perform

to perform the complete concerto in the studio.

Sir Charles Groves conducted the London Symphony Orchestra.

Here to play the Cello Concerto by Shostakovich,

is Mstislav Rostropovitch.

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Rostropovich had rarely been seen on British television

and this performance was a revelation, inspiring

a whole generation of which is cellists, myself included.

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We move back to the 1920s for another of my key influences,

Beatrice Harrison - the most renowned British cellist of her day.

Her playing was admired by both Elgar and Delius

and I love her recordings.

Strangely enough, the style of Beatrice Harrison's playing

probably influenced me nearly as much as Rostropovitch.

There was a kind of freedom about her playing that seemed to be

no limits to what she could do on the cello and she would kind

of fly into flights of fantasy.

It was just captivating.

Harrison became one of the first stars of BBC radio

after an extraordinary moment in broadcasting history.

Beatrice would practice cello in her garden and one day, to her great

surprise, a nightingale started to sing along with her cello.

NIGHTINGALE TWEETS

So on 19 May 1924, a team of BBC engineers was dispatched

to Surry to try and capture the magic of

the cello and the nightingale

together on their very primitive equipment.

The nightingale was decidedly bashful that night but it

finally started to sing moments before they had to go home.

It was the first of a series of garden broadcasts and records which

made Beatrice Harrison one of the most famous cellists in the world.

NIGHTINGALE TWEETS THROUGHOUT

-BEATRICE:

-And then he left.

One of the things that will definitely emerge from this

programme is the many different styles in which you can play the cello.

For example, you might get a player who doesn't like to do very

much vibrato and it will sort of sound like this.

HE PLAYS SMOOTHLY

Cold, and then you warm the sound up with...

HE PLAYS A WARMER TONE

And immediately, the sound rings out and of course,

you can play the cello like a guitar.

You can pluck the strings and there's lots of effects

on a cello like harmonics...

HE PLAYS A HARMONIC

It can be a very eerie instrument.

At the 2016 Proms, the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta created

one of the most memorable moments of the season by playing an

extraordinary piece exploiting many of these techniques and more.

SOPRANO SINGS

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In comparison with the piano and the violin at the start of

the 20th century little music was composed specifically for the cello.

So the Russian born American cellist Gregor Piatigorsky,

a 6' 4" giant of a man, commissioned one of the best-known

composers of the day, Sir William Walton, to write a Concerto for him.

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was at the Royal Festival Hall

to hear its European premiere with the BBC Symphony Orchestra

conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.

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And here come Mischa Maisky and Dmitry Sitkovetsky to perform

one of the most glorious works in the Romantic orchestral repertoire.

Mischa is actually the only cellist who can say that

he studied with both Rostropovitch and Piatigorsky.

But that's not what makes him special.

He has an incredibly individual style of playing as you can

hear in this extract from the Brahms Concerto For Violin And Cello.

Before leaving the Brahms Double Concerto,

here's another beautiful performance,

this time featuring Leonard Rose,

the most influential American cellist and teacher of his time.

He's playing with his friend the violinist and Isaac Stern

and we join them towards the end of the slow movement.

Our next classic cellist is Maurice Gendron.

He was perhaps less of a showman than some of the others.

Gendron had a style that's perhaps

a little bit different to anything we've heard so far.

It was a very clean way of playing,

very pure and always a beautiful sound as you'll hear in this

performance of the last movement of Haydn's Concerto In D.

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I hope you've enjoyed this programme of classic cellists at the BBC,

a celebration of this most personal instrument

played by some of its very greatest practitioners.

And they don't come any greater than Rostropovich with his great

collaborator Benjamin Britten playing the finale

of Tchaikovsky's Variations On A Rococo Theme.

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