Arts diary: Star cellist puts the Borders before Berlin

Published on Wednesday 20 May 2009 19:01

STEVEN Isserlis is known the world over for his total command of the cello, as well as his thick mop of curly hair, which pitches about wildly as he plays. When he comes to Scotland, as he did last year, it's typically to perform at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, but this weekend he'll be appearing at a more modest venue: the Victoria Halls in Selkirk, in the company of the Scottish Borders Community Orchestra (SBCO), a mix of local amateur and professional players.

Surprising? Not really. Although Isserlis, right, was born in London, the grandson of a Russian-Jewish migr, his ties to the Borders run deep."I only play very rarely in Scotland these days," he says, "but I do have very strong links to the area, going back to when I was a teenager."

"At the age of 15, I moved to the Borders – to a little village called Edrom, near Duns in Berwickshire – where my teacher Jane Cowan lived. From there she ran her little school (known rather grandly, and misleadingly, as the International Cello Centre). I studied with her there for two years.

When she died, the Cello Centre pretty much ceased to be, but from its ashes arose the Scottish Borders Community Orchestra."

Isserlis is patron of the SBCO and he played the opening concert with Jane Cowan's daughter Lucy as leader, as she will be on Saturday, in Isserlis's first appearance with the orchestra in five years. Visitors who make the pilgrimage will see Isserlis as the soloist in Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No 1 – which he is scheduled to play in Berlin in early June.

Edinburgh's James Lowe conducts, and for those who want to make a day of it there's an open rehearsal in the afternoon.

Hollywood brought to book

DO GREAT children's books make great movies? Not according to Anthony Horowitz, the prolific, rambunctious, and permatanned mega-selling children's author who was in Edinburgh last week, giving a talk that was webcast to 11,000 children in schools and libraries.

Between preaching the virtues of reading and shocking his young audience with cracks about his miserable grandmother and why parents must always be killed at the start of a good yarn, Horowitz talked Hollywood.

Stormbreaker, the big-screen adaptation of the first book in his Alex Rider series, was a bust, failing to get a significant US distribution and dooming the chances of a sequel. He blamed it squarely on producer Harvey Weinstein, and his alleged insistence that it should play to six-year-olds, so killing, Horowitz said, "all the edge and the darkness and the violence of the Rider books that hooks the 12-13-year-olds".

"Very, very few children's books do actually seem to translate well onto the big screen.

"Even The Golden Compass, which was made with a much bigger budget, managed to bankrupt the company that made it. There's no sequel to that film happening. It had a towering cast, and yet something went wrong.

"All I can say when you are dealing with children, and particularly the imagination of children, somehow Hollywood, with all the money in the world, can't quite seem to build the bridge."

Seen you, little Jimmy

A DIFFERENT kind of celebrity spotting at Starbucks in the Canongate in Edinburgh this week: "Little" Jimmy Osmond. Following in the twinkling footsteps of stage leviathans such as Darius Danesh and Marti Pellow, Osmond is currently giving it the old razzle-dazzle as Billy Flynn in Chicago at the Edinburgh Playhouse. "He's very, very lovely and he will speak to anybody who chats, or recognises him or even points a finger," say Playhouse staffers.