It's the playing that counts - not winning

Jamie Walton is the soloist with the APO next Thursday. Photo / Supplied

A few days ago, English cellist Jamie Walton was playing sonatas by Beethoven, Debussy and Rachmaninov in Melbourne's new Recital Centre in between concerts by Australian cutting-edge composer Anthony Pateras and the German violinist Isabelle Faust. Next Thursday he is the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's soloist for its first Splendour of Tchaikovsky programme.

"The Russian repertoire has that depth that I enjoy delving into," he says, revealing that Thursday's Variations on a Rococo Theme "was one of the pieces that truly motivated me into becoming a cellist".

Walton is happy the APO is using Tchaikovsky's original score, as opposed to the initially published version, which was seriously tampered with by the cellist who premiered it. The superiority of the original can be summed up in four words: "The composer knows best!"

As for the work's challenges, "You almost have to be a ballet dancer in this piece, with all the sudden changes of tempo and style. Just when you're getting into one variation, you're popping off into the next."

Walton's well-reviewed CDs, the most recent of which pairs Britten's Cello Symphony and Shostakovich's Second Concerto, suggest this man is something of a Russophile. His first disc coupled Elgar and Myaskovsky and an imminent third will wed the composer Sir William Walton and Shostakovich's First Concerto. "I've done all that I can for Anglo-Russian relations," he laughs.

Now in his early 30s, Walton comes across as a breezy, affable Englishman although he says it was his introspective, rather melancholy personality as a child that drew him to the cello.

"Your personality always chooses your instrument," he stresses. "I was so struck by Yehudi Menuhin's recordings when I was young that they made me cry. I wanted to make that sound but in the cello register."

How could one resist asking whether the legend of Jacqueline Du Pre had had any effect on him?

"I was very inspired by her energy, spirit and passion," is Walton's immediate response. "I suppose she's the cellist's equivalent of Maria Callas. But I can't say that I was musically influenced. I didn't buy the records. They didn't resonate with me on a musical level."

Walton looks further back into the last century for his heroes and the greatest is Pablo Casals, "who embodied authenticity and an uncompromising approach to music, as well as producing a sound that went straight from his heart to yours".

Indeed, compromise is to be avoided at all costs. "It may be difficult but never give up. Ultimately, it will pay out. You will end up sounding original and true to yourself. I've always refused to do competitions because I would have had to compromise my standards and for many years my career was in the doldrums because I refused to go down that easy route.

"In fact, I couldn't be more militantly opposed to competitions," he says, with a grim laugh. "There's a real danger you can develop a style of playing that is too technically clean at the expense of individuality of sound. Musicians like Menuhin and Alfred Cortot, whose playing was sometimes technically flawed, might not have won a competition, yet theirs was the sort of poetic genius that made them great artists and channellers of music.

"But then," he reflects, "all my favourite recordings are pretty much pre-1950. There, behind all the crackle and dust, you can hear a golden age of music-making, when people weren't paranoid about playing the right notes or winning a competition. It was all about the music."

Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra - The Splendour of Tchaikovsky
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday at 8pm
On disc: Jamie Walton, Shostakovich & Britten (Signum Classics, through Ode Records