At the Mozartfest in Augsburg this year, the cellist Steven Isserlis performed during the final concert in Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Don Quixote.” Isserlis’s photograph was plastered all over the festival’s materials, but he insisted that the work was not a kind of concerto for him to star in. Before the performance, I interviewed him in public as part of the festival’s activities. (Full disclosure: I was paid by the Mozartfest to do the public interview. The decision to reprint the conversation in VAN was made independently of my work there.) The following is an edited and condensed version of our talk.
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