SURROUNDED BY SOUND

The German–Canadian cellist Johannes Moser embraces experimentation. He talks to Peter Quantrill about channelling his inner Jimi Hendrix and exploring the sound of the electric cello which, alongside the conventional cello, features in his latest recordings for Platoon

Late last summer I found myself somewhere familiar yet foreign: Platoon 7 is a brand new recording studio in London’s King’s Cross run by Platoon, a global artist services company. I was admitted mid-session, and sat minding my own business while the producers shuttled between banks of kit. On the other side of the glass, the cellist Johannes Moser added bar after bar and layer after layer to his new multitracked album Alone Together, alternating between his 1694 Andrea Guarneri and a Ned Steinberger electric cello festooned with ports and wires. Six commissioned new pieces sit beside multitracked arrangements of string classics: Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, Klengel’s Hymnus and Casals’s Song of the Birds among them.

Alone Together was conceived and recorded to take full advantage of spatial audio, an immersive, hitherto almost exclusively cinematic effect that creates the impression of sound moving around the listener in three dimensions. The experience is at once vividly naturalistic and yet unsettling, like the dual identity of the electric cello behind the glass. Here, at least, the 42-year-old Moser can call upon decades of experience unmatched by his colleagues.

As he explains on a subsequent Zoom call, Moser first encountered the – or an – electric cello during his studies with David Geringas. Yamaha had sent the Lithuanian cellist a model to try out, but Geringas wasn’t interested. It lay there in a box until Moser walked off with it one day and began experimenting, ‘pretending I was Jimi Hendrix or something’. What did Geringas think about that? ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask him –I just took it!’ After a while Moser acquired his own model and began taking it more seriously, fired by the intersection of ‘my fascination with technology and my love of the cello’. He compares the electric cello to a sandbox game: ‘a musical playground I can develop and float in without needing to strive for unattainable perfection’.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic agreed to commission a concerto for the instrument if Moser could find the right composer. He hit the bullseye with the Mexican composer Enrico Chapela (b.1974), and the ensuing Magnetar (2011) became a showcase both for the instrument itself and for Moser at a pivotal stage of his career. He gave more than 30 performances of the concerto over the next few years, at least one of which is available on YouTube (bit.ly/3Md3fAm). Moser sits on stage as usual with the diminutive, violsized instrument, the novelty of which is somewhat dwarfed by the large speaker and box of tricks (well, open laptop) by his side. Magnetar itself, however, sustains the architectural span of a relatively traditional 23-minute, three-section work with a remarkable strength, criss-crossing fluently between Stravinskian savagery and wa-wa blues.

Johannes Moser with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the 2021 BBC Proms

BBC/CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

Recording at the Platoon studios in London

‘CAN YOU TAKE CELLOISM OUT OF THE CELLO AND JUST USE CELLO TECHNIQUE ON AN INSTRUMENT THAT OFFERS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ARRAY OF POSSIBILITIES? I DON’T HAVE THE ANSWER TO THAT YET’

‘Part of its success,’ acknowledges Moser, ‘aside from being extremely entertaining in its own right, lies in the novelty that very few other pieces have so far been written for electric cello and orchestra. I would feel it was even more successful if another cellist picked it up. The most successful of Rostropovich’s commissions were the ones he decided to perform over and over again. The Shostakovich, Britten, Prokofiev concertos have entered the repertoire, and to a lesser extent the Lutosławski and Dutilleux. But how often do you hear Jolivet’s Second Concerto?’

A decade on, however, Magnetar has generated neither a commercial recording nor a flood (or even a trickle) of similar commissions. The electric cello still presents fundamental challenges as well as opportunities in equal measure. Firstly, aesthetic: ‘The sound provided by the instrument itself is relatively flat and simple, so you have to resort to a lot of effects to bring depth and colour to it. When we listen to an acoustic cello, we’re used to its warmth, and range of colours and closeness to the human voice. The electric cello takes these intrinsically “cellistic” qualities out of the mix, and so you have to compensate with other things. That is part of the journey. Can you take celloism out of the cello and just use cello technique on an instrument that offers a completely different array of possibilities? I don’t have the answer to that yet, and maybe it’s not for me as a performer to find that answer.’

Moser with Mstislav Rostropovich and David Geringas in 1998

RECORDING PHOTO JACK DURMAN. ROSTROPOVICH PHOTO JOHANNES MOSER

The electric cello also demands a particular kind of performer, one as willing as Moser to tap into their inner Hendrix. ‘It doesn’t matter on one level whether you play it very simply or with a lot of theatre, because the sound is the same. I had to ask myself how to make Magnetar into a performative act. Look at the guitar heroes of the last 50 years: if they just stood there, the sound would be exactly the same. But we have to be conscious of how much is self-serving show and how much heightens the engagement and draws the listener in. I had to rethink completely how I wanted to “sell” my performance in that regard, and I still think an electric guitar scores over an electric cello when it comes to rocking out! It’s also a problem faced by a lot of DJs on the techno scene. They could just hit the space bar at a live gig, but you see them turning knobs and dancing around their kit. It’s theatre. They’re trying to make a pre-recorded track into something relatable for an audience who want to experience the sound and at the same time cheer on a hero or heroine on the stage. That’s the essence of performative art. We want to see the gladiators succeed – or give them the thumbs down.’

Popular perception of the electric cello is dominated worldwide by the success of 2Cellos, a Croatian duo with several Sony albums to their name, mostly of pop and rock covers. With the new commissions recorded for Platoon, Moser is trying to sail the instrument against the prevailing wind. ‘I asked myself how I could include the electric cello in new music as I understand it, which has very little to do with Metallica or Michael Jackson. And I think we show in these recordings that there is a very wide palette of expression. Composer Annie Gosfield uses old radio signals from the Second World War, and they fit perfectly with the rather nasal quality of the electric cello. You have two electric sources: one being signals used to distort the signals of the enemy, the other being me getting into conversation with them. That’s a perfect example. Ellen Reid and Nina C. Young only use cello sounds, with a lot of reverb and software processing. All the other composers used more pre-recorded material. Christopher Cerrone’s piece is full of subtle harmonic changes, and the electric cello is a wonderful part of a bigger picture.’

It is no accident that all the composers involved are American. One reason is that the commissions are sponsored by a West Coast patron, Justus Schlichting, who with his wife Elizabeth has supported more than two hundred new pieces in the last 15 years. Another reason lies in the greater openness of American composers to the instrument compared with what Moser calls ‘the anxiety that some European composers have in using electronics in a playful way’. As it happens, anxiety was exactly what I felt in the Platoon studio, watching and listening to Moser record Somewhere There Is Something Else by Ellen Reid (b.1983) and struggling to reconcile one perception with another. ‘This is a really important issue,’ Moser acknowledges. ‘When you use software and electronics, how much of it is the human, and how much the machine? We don’t want to give up our fragile emotions to something that comes out of a machine. And I think we are wise to remain cautious, with artificial intelligence becoming smarter every day. When you can’t see an action having a clear relation to a sound, how do you invest yourself emotionally? I have noticed this problem from the beginning, which is why I don’t like pre-recorded tracks. If 80 per cent of the piece is on a track and I am contributing a little doodle over the top, that’s just glorified karaoke. In our new-music world, “tape” as it used to be called, or pre-recorded tracks, are a fixed standard, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.’

Moser also acknowledges the transatlantic divide for reception of new music, shrewdly negotiated in the case of Magnetar by securing co-commission status with the CBSO in the UK and the São Paulo SO in Brazil. ‘There is still a European snobbery that if a piece is to be understood on first hearing it can’t be good. And on the American side, there is the idea that if you don’t enjoy a piece of music, it must be rubbish. The truth isn’t even in the middle. It’s none of those things.’

Shortly before the pandemic he gave the premiere of a new concerto (for acoustic cello) by Bernd Richard Deutsch (b.1977): ‘I think it’s a masterpiece, but I performed it once, and already I find it’s tough to bring it to orchestras, which would rather do Shostakovich One.’ Perhaps Deutsch’s post as composer-in-association with the Cleveland Orchestra (led by a fellow Austrian, Franz Welser-Möst) may lead to something: ‘You need configurations like that. Then you have Thomas Adès, who works on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe we get the occasional John Adams piece, and Andrew Norman. After that already it wears a bit thin.’

Performing Enrico Chapela’s Magnetar with the composer (right)

‘WHEN YOU USE SOFTWARE AND ELECTRONICS, HOW MUCH OF IT IS HUMAN, AND HOW MUCH MACHINE? WE DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP OUR FRAGILE EMOTIONS TO SOMETHING THAT COMES OUT OF A MACHINE’

Meanwhile, yet another cello concerto has made it to record thanks to Moser’s indefatigable industry in the service of new music: a much more picturesque and tonally assuaging work by Fernando Velázquez (b.1976), better known in his Spanish homeland as a composer for film and TV. Moser’s breadth of sympathy marks him out, as does his energy. He is the exemplar of the modern cellist, for whom nothing is foreign and everything is worth taking seriously. He balances the shiftless consistency of the travelling virtuoso, who purveys Dvořák and Schumann to the four corners of the earth, with adventures at all four corners of the repertoire, and with a teaching career which has centred on the conservatoire in Cologne for several years.

A long the way, Moser has steadily accumulated a discography that counts as a substantial achievement by anyone’s standards. He began recording for Hänssler shortly after his big-ticket win at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition in 2002, his repertoire ranging from sonatas by Bax and Brahms to concertos by Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich. Switching to the Dutch label Pentatone in 2014, he struck up a lively partnership of equals with the pianist Alasdair Beatson in a delightful album of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, while also setting down mature accounts of the magnetic poles of the concertante repertoire, from Tchaikovsky to Elgar to Lutosławski (and now Velázquez). A few weeks before we met at the Platoon studio, I watched Moser take to the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, London (an acoustic graveyard for all but the most charismatic cellists), and play the Elgar with an acute sensitivity to its place on the shifting sands of European modernism, as well as the deeper vein of its elegy for the passing of the long 19th century.

At the Platoon sessions with violinist Aleksey Igudesman

PHOTOS: JACK DURMAN

This artistic confidence – self-centred in the best way – may have its roots not only in Moser’s immersive musical upbringing (as the son of Kai Moser, a long-time cellist with the Bavarian Radio SO, while his mother is the soprano Edith Wiens) but also in a characteristically decisive response to the invitation to make his Berlin Philharmonic debut in October 2011, playing Schumann under the baton of Zubin Mehta. ‘I hung up the phone and said, “I cannot do this by myself. This is the stage that belongs to Rostropovich and Perlman and all my heroes. I will be an intruder in a space that I have held dear all my life.”’

For the next 18 months, Moser took coaching from a sports psychologist, working most of all on visualisation. ‘Getting up from a pre-concert nap, taking a taxi to the hall, going up those steps at the Philharmonie, hearing that signal to go to the stage: when it came to the day, my heart was still 180bpm and I was still a nervous wreck, but I knew that I had done it so many times in my mind that I could do it here and now.’

Such a course of action takes – or demonstrates – both humility and ambition. ‘I told my psychologist at the beginning of the process that I didn’t just want to survive this experience,’ says Moser. ‘I wanted to feel that it was something I had done for myself. You see so many performers – and in my youth I was one of them – who barely manage. You hear them talk like they hate being on the road; they are miserable in concerts; they hate practising, and not sleeping in their own bed. And I wonder, what are you doing with your life? If you are not able to do this job – this calling – for yourself, and come to a point when you say, this is the pinnacle of professional fulfilment, then why bother? Some young musicians give a lot of interviews to get more concerts, and play more concerts to get more interviews. It’s a rat race. If you can’t define the point at which you feel you have arrived, then you burn out, because you are just doing things in order to do other things.’

Moser with his acoustic and electric instruments

Over lunch after the studio session we discussed how a ‘playlist culture’ has developed a broader, but also more atomised and more passive (my term) attitude to listening and learning than the one we grew up with. Back on Zoom, I wonder aloud how possible it is to pass on his breadth of perspective to his students in Cologne, and Moser sighs. ‘I have struggled with this question for a long time – whether or not I should be a career advisor for my students. More and more I believe my primary mission is to be an artistic advisor. I am there to teach music, as obvious as that sounds. Because at the end of the day I don’t know if my students will go on to become musicians. Maybe they will become primary-school teachers or investment bankers. I feel that if I were to encourage them to do this internship with that orchestra, or this audition here, and coach them on how you pass it, it would not be helpful in the long term. That isn’t how a 21st-century musician works any longer. What I can do is live my own version of a musician’s life to its fullest and highest capability. And as an example I can also deter someone from pursuing that path. Some students will say they don’t want to be away on the road 250 days a year, giving concerts and teaching. They may want a steady job, nine to five. They can also learn that from me.’

Like every other 21st-century musician, Moser had to re-examine his own raison d’être while the world’s concert halls went dark. Like some of his colleagues, he sprang on to social media and rapidly adapted to new ways of communicating. ‘I feel sorry for musicians who are not willing or able to be creative with the design of their career. But I learnt in this period that I am not so terrible at living another life. I used to wonder what I would be able to do if I were not a performer: “Is Johannes Moser worth five cents when he’s not on stage?” And I found, yes, there were other things I could do. I am most passionate when I am on stage, but life continues in other ways.’ It’s fair to say that Moser is worth a few dollars more than five cents.

Alone Together is released on 17 June and will be available on all digital music platforms. For more information visit https://platoon.lnk.to/alonetogether