Steven Isserlis leads the Academy of St Martin in the Fields through a night of elegance
Returning to the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields for their first collaboration since 2016, the ASMF reunited with Steven Isserlis in an evening shaped by the ethos of chamber music at scale. Traversing Enlightenment restraint, operatic lyricism, Classical poise and late-Romantic gravity, the evening traced a journey through variated sound worlds From Charles Avison’s reimagining of Scarlatti, Haydn’s youthful cello concerto to Arensky’s symphonically expanded chamber writing, the programme asked how private musical rhetoric transforms into larger, more public spaces.
In the opening Scarlatti/Avison Concerto Grosso No. 5 in D minor, the ensemble resisted overt Baroque exuberance, but instead showcased Avison’s cultivated aesthetic. The string sound was modern: clean, light and delicate. Without heavy baroque rhetoric, the ASMF orchestra produced a refined and galant texture. This style also matched Steven Isserlis’s cello which shaped phrases from inside the orchestration: expressive but not too heroic, carrying elegant conversational ease. At some certain moments, I even felt a little bit of Classical restraint of clarity and formal balance, translating Scarlatti’s Mediterranean fashion into Avison’s Enlightenment language of a cooler and more measured taste.
Such approach towards Baroque and Classical repertoire, favouring poise over pungency, defined the night with the exception of Handel’s Two Arias for Winds (HWV 410 and 411). The two arias were merry, buoyant, and at times lightly heroic with open-hearted gestures, though the brightness of the wind writing occasionally tipped towards a slightly over-bright sound world with excessive cheerfulness.
Following Handel’s merry lyricism is Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major (Hob. VIIb:1), in which Isserlis approached the solo line with striking self-restraint. In the Moderato, his bowing produced a chesty, textured sound, deliberately unbright. This framed the music as dialectical, intellectual in its shaping and expressive without tipping into overt emotion or virtuoso display. The Adagio unfolded with serene poise, its lyricism carefully contained, while the Allegro molto favoured elegance and ease. To demonstrate this measured solo presence, the orchestra sounded comparatively energetic that gave credits to Haydn’s youthful, floral virtuosity. For me, Haydn can feel like a rose-scented diffuser: lush, immediately appealing, and perhaps too comfortably familiar in its floral ease. Isserlis subtly recalibrated that balance, grounding the concerto with a woodier sonority beneath, adding profound and reserved depth.
As a piece so saturated with inherited sentiment that it often collapses under its own melancholy, Isserlis offered a reading of Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile with striking composure. The tone was serene and contemplative, marked by self-restraint rather than fragility and luxuriating grief. Instead of private lament, the music unfolded with a broad, almost cinematic sweep, sounding like mid-twentieth-century film score. The tempo, elastic and firmly held maintained structural steadiness. Refusing sentimentalisation, Isserlis made this over-familiar movement feel unexpectedly fresh.
The programme closed with Anton Arensky’s Chamber Symphony in A minor, which unfolded as a Russian Orthodox funeral chant, solemn and processional. Even as the orchestral writing expanded into a cinematic, almost symphonic grandeur, Isserlis remained expressively cool and restrained. The music’s shifting textures occasionally evoked other East European folk idioms, but the arrangement decisively transforms private mourning into something more monumental and ceremonially expansive.
The concert was at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on 5th Feb, 2026. It is now concluded.