A hundred cellists gathered at Disney Hall for an Anna Clyne première. Illustration by Guido Scarabottolo

“I wish I’d studied the cello” was a common lament among the crowds at the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, which drew a hundred cellists to Los Angeles in the middle of May. I said it myself, recalling tense childhood negotiations with the oboe. Outsiders like to think that the cello, the most uncannily human-sounding of instruments (it approximates a vocal range from low male to high female), would provide limitless companionship and consolation. We imagine ourselves playing Bach as dusk descends, savoring pensive joys and sweet sorrows. That the fantasy is unrealistic in the extreme—a regal contralto timbre arises only from a combination of freakish talent and thousands of hours of labor—hardly detracts from the vicarious pleasure of watching a master cellist give public shape to a private world.

The cello is a relative latecomer on the concert platform, having achieved true star status only in the nineteenth century. Its autumnal voice seduced the Romantics: the pioneering concerto is Schumann’s, which begins not with a heroic display but with a great meandering rumination. At the start of the twentieth century, Pablo Casals brought Bach’s suites to a wide public, and an even deeper well of gravitas opened. In part because of Casals’s moral force as a foe of Fascism and nuclear arms, the cello took on an oracular accent, an aura at once beatific and brooding. Mstislav Rostropovich played a similar role during the Cold War, and Yo-Yo Ma now carries on this tradition of public citizenship, his presence almost mandatory at scenes of global disaster.

Yet the Piatigorsky Festival—a ten-day affair, divided between the University of Southern California and Disney Hall—was not the place to muse on the cello’s reputation for solemnity. A try-anything atmosphere prevailed, with a hint of late-night collegiate shenanigans sneaking in. Cellists sang, shouted, and banged gongs during performances. The renegade Italian cellist-composer Giovanni Sollima led exercises in improvisation, from Baroque styles to avant-garde noise-making. The repertory ran the gamut from Gesualdo (the sakura cello quintet arranged his madrigals) to Radiohead (Matt Haimovitz and Christopher O’Riley played the band’s “Pyramid Song”). The festival seemed intent on maximizing that familiar sense of the cello’s humanness: in every imaginable way, the instrument became a proxy for the person behind it.

The festival is named for Gregor Piatigorsky, the golden-toned, big-hearted Russian virtuoso, who moved to L.A. in 1949 and later took a position teaching at U.S.C. The Piatigorsky chair at U.S.C.’s Thornton School of Music is now held by the veteran American cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, who launched the festival, a quadrennial event, partly to create a meeting place for touring musicians whose paths seldom intersect. This year, he enticed twenty-five of his colleagues to perform and conduct master classes, alongside several dozen student fellows. Like some other sectors of classical music, the cello world suffers from a gender imbalance; only two of the lead players were women, and neither gave a master class. It would have been much healthier to have female voices sharing in the handing down of edicts.

Telling differences emerged as the festival went on. Sometimes these echoed the old national schools of cello playing: the pristine tone and smooth legato of the French school, exemplified by Pierre Fournier; the flexible precision of the German school, associated with Emanuel Feuermann; the booming resonance of the Russian school, embodied by Rostropovich. These labels have long been of limited usefulness, but a given player often leans in one direction or another. Ma, for example, has a tinge of Frenchness, as he showed in a recital at Disney Hall, giving a silken sheen to the Shostakovich Sonata in D Minor. By contrast, Mischa Maisky, who studied with both Rostropovich and Piatigorsky, gave a startlingly violent reading of the Britten Sonata in C, infusing it with the bite and fury that Ma had omitted from the Shostakovich.

Above all, the question is how a proficient player can become a distinctive one. At one master class, the Swiss cellist and composer Thomas Demenga, a musician of piercing intelligence who appears rarely in this country, cross-examined Coleman Itzkoff, a graduate student of Kirshbaum’s at U.S.C. Itzkoff essayed the Prelude of Bach’s Fifth Suite, exhibiting a flawless technique and keen musicality. As Demenga pointed out, the interpretation was “shall we say, a bit Romantic”—sanding away the sharper corners of Bach’s language. Demenga wanted more naturalness, more grit. “Don’t be afraid to play these notes too harshly,” he said at one point. When a low C appeared beneath an upper line, he urged, “Don’t connect!”—he wanted the voices kept separate instead of integrated into a single flowing line. He asked for one held note to rise and fall in volume like a ball thrown in the air. After forty-five minutes, Itzkoff had emerged with a more idiosyncratic, articulate reading.

That same day, Laurence Lesser, a Piatigorsky pupil who serves as the cello sage at the New England Conservatory, advised Annie Jacobs-Perkins, another Kirshbaum protégée, on Martinů’s Second Sonata. Jacobs-Perkins delivered the desolate Largo with hypnotic lyricism, causing listeners to forget where they were for a moment. Lesser made a technical suggestion, asking her to bow more evenly across the first falling phrase. He also pushed her to give the entire opening melody an archlike shape, so that it sang toward a climax, then subsided. Some people in the audience may have wondered why Lesser was tinkering with an already gorgeous rendition, but he offered a credo: “When someone plays as beautifully as you do, it’s easy for me to be fussy, because no matter how far we are there’s always more.”

The sonic spectacular of the festival was a gathering of a hundred cellists at Disney Hall, with Kirshbaum and his colleagues filling the front rows of the orchestra. The young conductor-composer Matthew Aucoin led the première of Anna Clyne’s “Threads & Traces,” for the full ensemble. Clyne’s score maintained soft dynamics, and the ensemble shimmered with harmonics and fragmentary modal melodies. Anyone who felt deprived of maximum noise could take satisfaction in the heaving chant of Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1.”

There was much else to celebrate in the series. The young Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta was sinewy and sonorous in Martinů’s First Concerto—one of three concerto performances with Leonard Slatkin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Zuill Bailey slalomed furiously through Piatigorsky’s Variations on a Paganini Theme, which contains parodic portraits of fellow-musicians, including Jascha Heifetz on a high-register tear. David Geringas gave an exacting, elevated account of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Canticle of the Sun.” (This was the piece in which the cellist doubled on gong.) On the final night, eight cellists joined forces to play Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano, capturing different sides of the Master’s personality: Demenga brought intellectual mischief to the Sonata Opus 102 No. 1; Jean-Guihen Queyras relished the cantilena of Opus 102 No. 2; and Colin Carr animated every turn of the great Sonata Opus 69.

The performance that will stay longest in my mind, though, was of the Elgar concerto, with the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk. No player at the festival produced a handsomer tone: Mørk had the benefit of a magnificent instrument, a 1723 Domenico Montagnana, and he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall. As an interpreter, Mørk avoided the noble-minded protocol—the high-school-graduation tread—that is too common in Elgar. Unmannered rubato gave a sense of moment-to-moment improvisation, of a halting search for honest expression. What emerged was a monologue set against a landscape of shadows: the cellist as Shakespearean actor, uneasy with the crown of power. ♦