If one wants to describe Heinrich Schiff’s cello tone, one notices a basic excitement that ultimately lacks a little tonal serenity, which should not be understood as a flaw, but only serves to differentiate. Within this tonal space, however, Schiff had a limitless potential for variation, from the most violent attack to a toneless dying, from romantic fever to constructive clarity, from baroque lightness to a rousing flow of warmth. When he died in 2016, the music world lost one of the great musical energizers not only of his time.
Schiff was born in Gmunden, Austria, in 1951. He began playing the piano at the age of six and turned to the cello at the age of ten under the tutelage of his father. He studied in Vienna with Tobias Kühne and in Detmold with André Navarra. Navarra’s bowing technique, which is said to give the cello consistency and precision in all registers and dynamic registers, was mastered by Schiff convincingly. In 1971 he made his debut in Vienna and London. After that, his career developed unstoppably. In 1983 he played for the first time in the USA with the Cleveland Orchestra under Colin Davis. Schiff has given concerts with all the major orchestras, made music with the greatest and most difficult conductors, such as Sergiu Celibidache, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Michael Gielen or Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons or Esa-Pekka Salonen and others.
Schiff was not only an impressive cello virtuoso, a talented conductor and a great teacher, but also lived life to the full. On March 22, 2003, he first addressed the audience in Munich’s Herkulessaal before conducting the Munich Chamber Orchestra in Mozart’s E flat major symphony. Despite the start of the Iraq war, the decision was made to go to the concert “with deep dismay”. The audience applauded appreciatively. Heinrich Schiff faced the complexity of the circumstances and was agitated by the fatality of the USA’s decision to go to war.
21 CDs show versatility and liveliness without any scam
The box, released by Decca, brings together the recordings of concerts and chamber music that Schiff made for Deutsche Grammphon and Philipps in the 1980s and 1990s on 21 CDs. From Camille Saint-Saëns and Édouard Lalo to Witold Lutósławski or Bernd Alois Zimmermann, from Beethoven’s sonatas to Alfred Schnittke’s string trio, from Haydn’s to Shostakovich’s concertos, the versatility and the always glowing enthusiasm, sometimes the almost explosive impetus, with which Schiff designed these fundamentally different musical worlds, always with the utmost vitality in mind. So Schiff never came up with any sort of style mat or stitch that he could use to overlay the pieces and make them similar.
His experiences with historically oriented performance practice can be seen in Vivaldi concertos or the two concertos by Joseph Haydn. The recordings of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sonata with the pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja or of Sergei Prokofiev’s powerful Sinfonia concertante with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under André Previn prove that he also mastered the great romantic tone of Russian music.
Edward Elgar’s melancholy concerto, for example, is often performed as depressingly lamenting farewell music, often to the point of being unpleasantly sentimental. But Schiff oriented himself to the 1928 recording with the British cellist Beatrice Harrison, who, under the direction of the composer, played the piece briskly and collectedly, not tearfully. Schiff’s frothing temperament filled the melancholy of this work with exciting escalation, which did not make one think of tearful lamentation, but almost of angry rebellion. This is how he played it in public, and the recording with the Sächsische Staatskapelle under Neville Marriner bears witness to this. Or Dmitri Shostakovich’s concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich were exemplary because Schiff offered the first as an enormously rough tour de force and exactly captured the character of the second, which is permeated with sadness and that irony and that poisonous charm that Shostakovich unfolds can, so as not to cry out desperation and anger out loud.
Heinrich Schiff, full of physical devotion.
(Photo: Hansjoachim Mirschel)
Heinrich Schiff always played with burning intensity and physical devotion, who could count among the exalted, sometimes also positively hysterical. He knew no limits of repertoire and no limits of musical knowledge. That’s why he studied baroque styles with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and premiered Friedrich Gulda’s quirky, meanwhile downright popular cello concerto under his baton with rhythmic wit and undisguised humour. The fun in this mixture of styles is immediately conveyed in the recording with the Viennese wind ensemble. Antonin Dvořák’s concerto, so to speak the cello concerto of all cello concertos, was seen by Schiff in a memorable performance at the end of the 1980s with Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic as a great sinfonia concertante for cello and orchestra. The two recordings in this box, one with the Berlin Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink and the other with the Vienna Philharmonic under André Previn, also show this approach unmistakably.
Of course he occupied himself with new pieces and their composers. For example, he has worked with Luciano Berio, Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Wolfgang Rihm. In an interview with the Upper Austrian News In 2006 he pointed out that he didn’t do “terrifying concerts”, but that he spiced up every concert “with something unusual”: “Music listeners 250 years ago were only interested in what was new.” More important than his penchant for conducting was his impact as a great teacher, because here, too, he grabbed his students with irresistible intensity and led them into the heart of the music. Schiff didn’t act so much as he showed, demonstrated, questioned, demanded and observed, but he didn’t want imitation. A wide variety of talents have benefited from this.
It would be very desirable to publish the numerous live recordings of Schiff performances and to present recordings on other labels again. Because this box is missing the great Bach player, the rediscoverer of the bulky Arnold Schönberg concerto or the elegant cello concertos by the Belgian violin virtuoso and composer Henri Vieuxtemps. And not to forget, among many other things, the duos he recorded with the great violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann. The raising of the musical heritage of the master cellist and musical energizer Heinrich Schiff has only just begun with this impressive box.