“THERE'S NO POINT IN GETTING UP AND PLAYING A SHOSTAKOVICH CONCERTO À LA ROSTROPOVICH – THAT WOULD BE POINTLESS AND WOULD CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEATH OF PERFORMANCE.” It would be a surprising phenomenon if another musician alive got as much pleasure from performing as cellist Peter Wispelwey seems to. His renown as a performer is only matched by his sparkling enthusiasm and infectious personality, one that certainly comes across in his recordings. MusicTeachers.co.uk caught up with him in at a recording session in the Dutch city of Deventer. John Woodford reports

I have to admit to having had a bellyful of Holland – six trains to get to the ancient Dutch city of Deventer, a journey which shouldn’t have taken long, three hours standing on railway platforms and then a frantic search on a cold, rainy day looking for a seventeenth-century Mennonite church were a little too much to handle. Jared Sacks, managing director and engineer of Channel Classics, had told me to ring the bottom bell and, since it was loud enough to summon the faithful, it must have ruined the take. I think that neither cellist Pieter Wispelwey nor his collaborating pianist Paolo Giacometti were too thrilled, and after a brief hello, I was ushered into a small vestry which was doubling as the sound room. There I was politely requested to sit and wait for a lull in the proceedings when Pieter would be able to find a few minutes for a chat. Things had seemed tense, but remarkably, the monitor told a different story, one in which tomfoolery, if not out-and-out lunacy, was interspersed with some brilliant, thought-provoking playing. “Don’t worry about them”, commented Sacks, “things get quite intense during recording sessions and they need to get it out of their hair.” He joined in.

Wispelwey is one of a small group of musicians who performs to critical acclaim on both modern and period instruments: “It’s quite a simple thing…it all comes down to a vague idea I had that playing on modern instruments is not always the most beautiful way of approaching early music. I was curious to see whether it would result in anything worthwhile.” He had been performing the Bach suites annually on his modern cello, but then someone offered him a Baroque instrument, something he was unable to refuse. “I was already used to gut strings, having only graduated to steel strings when I had to play Shostakovich and Britten concerti, so I was okay with that, but the process of using a Baroque bow and playing at a lower pitch was quite an awkward one, since, to a modern player, it is not as straightforward as it might seem. So few instrumentalists turn to early instruments, yet their variety and diversity is absolutely huge, especially in the way they are set up and the material that was used…a German gut strung instrument was so different from an Italian one, so, if you say ‘I don’t like early instruments’, then you have to be much more specific. Take the piano, for instance. Most pianists seem to think of the modern piano as an improvement on the instruments that were around in Mozart and Beethoven’s day, but there were a couple of hundred piano builders in Vienna alone, so just dismissing the early piano in that way is stupidity.” His experimentation turned into idealism, finding that his initial thoughts about matching the instrument to the music provided an ideal vehicle for historical performance.

The first recording was with Channel Classics ten years ago, a company to which he feels an intense loyalty. Then he recorded the Bach suites, which was received with critical acclaim the world over. “As far as I was concerned, I was just a normal cellist who played Bach on a period instrument and I became a bit worried about being stigmatised as a Baroque cellist. So a few months later, I released Britten’s solo suites on a different label (Channel wasn’t ready for that yet). Then came Beethoven’s sonatas, which I immediately followed with the Kodály Sonata, again for the same reason. But it didn’t work…I became slightly stigmatised all the same.” This is something that has been the cause of some concern: “A cellist specialises in the music he has to play; there are only about 70 great pieces for us to play, and although the Baroque cello features in some of it, I still feel that all the repertory is worthwhile performing.”