Since the composition of The Protecting Veil in 1987, the cello has played an important role in John Tavener's music. Even when he was writing for instruments during the 1989-1995 period when the music on Svyati originated, Tavener's works carried strong overtones of Russian Orthodox church services, and the cello here, as Tavener himself points out, sometimes seems to stand in for the voice of a priest. These pieces have been recorded before, but cellist Steven Isserlis, who premiered The Protecting Veil and some of the works included here, sheds valuable light on this phase of Tavener's career by bringing them together on one disc.

Steven Isserlis is a splendid cellist with a consummate technique and a focused, intense tone capable of infinite variety. He's an enterprising, imaginative musician with a penchant for centering programs on a single composer or national idiom. He has recorded French sonatas for Virgin Classics, and for RCA, the works of Mendelssohn, John Taverner, Haydn, and Czech and Russian composers. On his latest CD, Isserlis performs four relatively unfamiliar compositions of Saint-Saëns. Unfortunately, obscure works by a good composer are usually neglected for a reason.

What a versatile artist Steven Isserlis is. Having made his name as a sympathetic interpreter of a wide variety of romantic and modern music, here he shows he can be just as persuasive in eighteenth-century repertoire. His stylistic awareness is evident in beautiful, elegant phrasing, selective use of vibrato and varied articulation, giving an expressive range that never conflicts with the music’s natural language. In the cello concertos he is helped by an extremely sensitive accompaniment, stressing the chamber musical aspects of Haydn’s pre-London orchestral writing. The soft, intimate sonority at 3'06'' in the first movement of the D major is a typical example. The Adagios are taken at a flowing speed, but Isserlis’s relaxed approach means they never sound hurried. The Allegro molto finale of the C major Concerto, on the other hand, sounds poised rather than the helter-skelter we often hear. In his understanding of the music, Isserlis is a long way ahead of Han-na Chang, whose version places the emphasis on fine, traditional-style cello playing. Mork’s vivacious, imaginative performances characterize the music very strongly, but my preference would be for Isserlis’s and Norrington’s lighter touch and greater refinement.

This survey of Strauss cello works includes one of the finest Don Quixotes since Pierre Fournier’s matchlessly aristocratic Berlin and Cleveland accounts. Steven Isserlis first met Cervantes’ “Knight of Rueful Countenance” a decade ago when he recorded the work for Virgin with the Minnesota Orchestra under Edo de Waart. You could take absolute technical command for granted, but what was doubly impressive was the way Isserlis brought out the Don’s internalized conflicts (an old man’s obsession with chivalry nullified by failing physical powers) so vividly. His insights emerge even more potently in this remake with Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian RSO. It’s impeccably delivered, with outstanding solo playing from Isserlis and his equally fine (but un-credited) Sancho Panza (viola) and also from the orchestra’s concertmaster.

Cello World is a wonderful collection of original works and arrangements from the repertoire of world-famous cellist Steven Isserlis. The inspired line-up of pieces includes Schumann's moving Intermezzo, Leonard's The Donkey and the Driver and Villa-Lobo's rippling Song of the Black Swan. This is the perfect volume for cellists looking for a variety of challenging repertoire.

'Concerto!' was a Channel Four TV series that showed participating soloists in rehearsal, in conversation with Dudley Moore and Michael Tilson Thomas and, ultimately, in performance, which resulted in several recordings, of which this is one. This disc is recommendable not so much for Steven Isserlis's Cello Concerto – smooth and intelligent as that is – as for the fillups. The swan has Moore and Tilson Thomas as joint accompanists, elegantly executed, but the items with Pascal Devoyon are especially valuable, the First Cello Sonata full of elegantly tailored drama, the two Romances, Chant saphique and Gavotte palpable charmers, tastefully played; and the headstrong, thematically memorable Allegro appassionato, one of the finest shorter pieces in the cellist's repertory. .

Steven Isserlis and Richard Egarr here assemble all the viola da gamba sonatas written by three composers born in the propitious year of 1685: one each by Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, and three by JS Bach. Isserlis plays them on the gamba’s modern cousin, the cello, and the microphone loves his playing, picking up all the nuances and scampering asides from his soft-spoken instrument which can sometimes get lost in big concert halls. Egarr on harpsichord matches Isserlis’s eloquence and rambunctious energy all the way. The dreamy, airy slow movement of Bach’s Sonata in G minor brings telling use of vibrato as Isserlis circles around Egarr, his playing at once idiomatic and soulful. An extra cellist reinforces the bass line in the Handel and Scarlatti, in which the composers give the harpsichordist only a framework; Egarr’s imaginative realisations ensure that even when Scarlatti is at his most repetitive, he is never dull.

With this programme of music for cello and piano, Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih transport us to the world immortalized in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – the Parisian high society and its glittering salons. For the composers of the time these provided a perfect platform for the introduction of new works, performed by the finest musicians in France for a sympathetic, educated and rich (!) audience. And for the music-loving Proust they offered countless opportunities to meet the composers that he so admired (and others that he may have admired a bit less…)

Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, For the Love of Brahms (Sony Classical). Available September 30, 2016, the new album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls “music about love and friendship.” Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for Violin and Cello) in A Minor, Op. 102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

An important release which again demonstrates Steven Isserlis’s deep commitment to the music of John Tavener. The realization of the album is movingly detailed in a booklet note which provides an eloquent counterpoint and commentary to the performances.

Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Denes Várjon are known as instrumentalists for connoisseurs, delving deep into the structures of work and programming them in intelligent ways. You wouldn't pick Isserlis as a Chopin specialist, and Chopin wrote very little chamber music anyway. But he and Várjon deliver a gripping performance of the Chopin Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 65, a notoriously troublesome work whose text is far from fixed. They play the first movement Maestoso, as it is marked in some sources, and they present a vision of the sonata as a work of great seriousness, complexity, and ambition.

Steven Isserlis’s award-winning discography spans his diverse interests in repertoire and his musicological enthusiasm, as well as demonstrating his supreme artistry and uniquely beautiful sound, and his first recording of the complete Bach cello suites is an indelibly important addition to the set. Steven writes that ‘the Bach suites are works of such total perfection, such sublimity, that it is well-nigh impossible to feel ready for them’. He has proved more than adequate to the task and this release is a triumphant conclusion to an artistic pilgrimage. Steven’s eloquent booklet notes reveal his personal thoughts about the suites, as well as extensive academic research.

Shostakovich's Cello Sonata belied the young composer's reputation as the 'enfant terrible' of early Soviet music. Steven Isserlis's praises it as ''the most popular cello sonata of the twentieth century.'' It features on this program alongside two other Russian masterpieces from pre-Revolutionary Prokofiev and Khrushchev era Kabalevsky.

Hyperion is delighted to present the world’s best-loved cello concerto performed by one of the world’s best-loved cellists: national treasure Steven Isserlis. Isserlis has waited 40 years to record this pinnacle of the repertoire, and here with his regular collaborators, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Harding, this long gestation has proved to be overwhelmingly fruitful. Isserlis writes of the concerto that ‘the power of its emotional journey, expressed with Dvorák’s characteristically folk-like simplicity and directness, offers an irresistible mix of the epic and the touchingly confessional’. The combination of emotional power and simplicity is also a feature of Isserlis’s playing, and part of what makes him such a consummate performer of this work.

For this 2016 Hyperion release, cellist Steven Isserlis and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi present a moving album of cello concertos by Edward Elgar and William Walton, along with Gustav Holst's Invocation and Imogen Holst's The Fall of the Leaf, a five-movement suite for solo cello. The program creates a profoundly pensive and even autumnal feeling, and Isserlis' tone is by turns reflective, lyrical, and poignantly elegiac, appropriate to the selections. The melancholy nostalgia of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor colors the album's mood from the outset, and notwithstanding passages of intense virtuosity, the rich but subdued sonorities of his burnished orchestration contribute to its brooding quality.