The new hero of the cello

A year after his death, the hole left by Mstislav Rostropovich at the heart of the cello shows no sign of healing. The cuddly Russian, known to everyone as Slava, was, along with the Catalan Pablo Casals, one of the two giants who dominated the instrument throughout the 20th century. They endowed it with moral purpose to the point where the cello became the recognised voice of humanity.

Casals resisted fascism to his last breath, refusing to revisit his homeland so long as General Franco was alive. Slava spoke out for human rights in Soviet Russia and was exiled for his dissidence. His death last April, mourned worldwide, left the cello leaderless and lacking contemporary focus.

Of the candidates, Yo-Yo Ma, the Chinese star famous for film scores and east-west fusions, is too busy being a record-label cash register to take a stand on anything important. The exquisite French line of Pierre Fournier and Paul Tortelier has dried up. None of a host of swaying blonde manes has revealed a new Jacqueline du Pré and none of Slava's many pupils has spoken out on Darfur or climate change. The classical cello has gone into personality deficit and, in a celebrity-driven culture, an art without a visible figurehead risks media oblivion.

I put this thought the other day to Steven Isserlis, the quirky, curly British cellist - who countered that maybe the cello needs a different set of priorities these days, less lofty and heroic, more practical and domestic. Isserlis, 50 this year, is an engaging mix of English inhibition and artistic swagger, self-deprecation and acute self-awareness. The linchpin of a circle of soloists who work together wherever they can, he runs his own chamber music series at London's Wigmore Hall and Frankfurt's Alte Oper and is among the first five names when an orchestra books the big cello concertos. Yet far from enjoying a jet-set lifestyle, he detests a system that keeps him in transit eight months of the year. But he can't resist. Unlike the giants, cellists nowadays have to do what they are told in a state of aggravated insecurity.

Isserlis dropped out of one of London's top fee-paying schools at 14, shuffled around the foothills on borrowed cellos and didn't really get going until his twenties were almost gone, when a concerto he solicited from John Tavener, then languishing in career doldrums and religious contemplations, raised the rafters at the BBC Proms. "I never thought it would get a second performance," he laughs.

The Protecting Veil relaunched Tavener as a trans-denominational guru and Isserlis as a mystic-looking interpreter in ringlets that could have been recast from one of Bach's wigs.

Successful as Isserlis now is, the latestarter in him cannot turn down work. He carries his cello through nightmare airports onto flights, often late, where he pays two full economy fares and is treated like a quarantined animal. "British Airways are the worst. Never an apology, no matter how awful they are."

He led a campaign two years ago against UK security rules that banned instruments, but not laptops, from aircraft cabins. He got a plug in the conductor's speech in the Last Night of the Proms and the restraints were eased, without obvious harm to public safety. It seemed a petty matter to raise at the most public moment in the musical calendar, trivial beside the great freedom causes of Slava and Casals. "Isn't the solution to fly less?" I suggest. "Play at home more. Save some ozone."

"Can't afford it," he shrugs. He has merged the mortgage on his 1740 Montagnaga with the one on his home in West Hampstead, but he is still years from paying them off. "I've promised Pauline to cut back flying," he sighs; from time to time he takes his wife on long-haul tours. His other cello is a Stradivarius on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation in Japan. "They are very nice to me," he says winningly.

It is tougher to be a cellist these days - more grunge travel (Slava flew firstclass), less respect, less opportunity for experiment.

"I'm surprised when an orchestra asks what I'd like to play instead of saying Maestro X has put Schumann, Dvorak, Elgar or Shostakovich on the schedule." Isserlis tries to keep the warhorses fresh - no more than three outings this year for the Elgar (which he plays on Friday at the Festival Hall) - but he cannot suppress the greater excitement of taking the Walton concerto to China in autumn. "I love that work, never get to do it enough." A Slava reissue box from Warner Classics reminds me of extraordinary concertos by Penderecki, Landowski, Schchedrin and Knaifel that lie unheard since Rostropovich's death, along with most of the 270 works he commissioned. "Slava was superman," says Isserlis, but he takes the view that the age of Titan is gone and that the cellist needs to look beyond his bridge to a broader view of the world. "It's not just about playing the cello," he insists.

One of his favourite gigs is a children's series that he runs at the 92nd Street Y in New York, a place where kids of all ages drop in to hear Isserlis and such chums as Joshua Bell teach, play and tell jokes. He has published two lighthearted lives of composers for children and his Wigmore Hall series is a fulcrum of musical concentration. In Cornwall each summer, at Prussia Cove, he gives seminars to young musicians on the values of friendship and conversation, the bedrock of chamber music.

"Every time I go to a boring classical concert I feel so angry," he says. "It reinforces people's clichéd and inaccurate view of what we do."

So what's the solution? "Play better. If you play better, people will listen better. If they listen, they will feel better."

This is a different form of idealism from grand political gestures. It is an understanding that the world advances in small steps, by showing a child what a C major chord is made of and a young musician what it can express. Isserlis may be right: the age of giants is over. What comes next is something more educative, more intimate and, for our time, infinitely more appropriate.

Steven Isserlis performs an all-Elgar programme at the Festival Hall (0871 663 2500; www.southbankcentre. co.uk) on Friday.