Pandemic is wake-up call for musicians: Korean-German cellist Isang Enders rethinks playing music organically

Cellist Isang Enders / Courtesy of Jino Park

Cellist Isang Enders contemplates the importance of the audience, playing music in a way that benefits the Earth

By Park Ji-won

Poster for cellist Isang Enders' recital / Courtesy of TLi Art Center

For cellist Isang Enders, music is genetic. His German father and Korean mother are both musicians. His parents chose to name their son after the famous Germany-based Korean composer, the late Yun Isang.

As indicated in his music-nurtured childhood, his journey to music has been unstoppable ever since he first played the cello at nine years old, following his piano teacher's advice that he would be more suitable for the musical instrument than the piano due to his "thick hands."

When he was 20, Enders was appointed the principal cellist of the Staatskapelle Dresden. The news came as a surprise to many who were familiar with the position, as it had been vacant for 10 years before he filled it.

After four years in the position, he decided to leave the traditional orchestra and start his career as a soloist, trying to find his musical identity. Since then, he has been building a solid reputation as a soloist, traveling all over the world performing and collaborating with many musicians and orchestras: conductors Zubin Mehta, Christoph Eschenbach and Chung Myung-whun; composer Chin Eun-suk; and Berlin's Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Stuttgart Philharmonic and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

Like other musicians, he hasn't been able to perform for the last year due to the pandemic. He made a visit to Korea to hold his first solo recital here in three years, where he will play Bach's Cello Suite Nos. 1, 3 and 6 at TLi Art Center in Seongnam City, Gyeonggi Province on Thursday. He recently shared his thoughts about the coronavirus pandemic, performance and music. This solo recital is the only one he will have in Korea this time apart from other concerto performances.

When the pandemic took away the stage from classical musicians, especially in Europe where he lives, he realized that musicians, who are prone to be self-centered, can only exist together with their audience.

"There was a tendency (among musicians) to neglect the audience. It's all about the music. It's all about the hours, and you have to live to honor the scores. But that is not true … We (musicians) are absolutely useless (during the pandemic). I could just as well work for Delivery Hero. I really wanted to come to Korea to play actually … I hope that the audience can feel my appreciation. I appreciate that the audience is coming," cellist Isang Enders said during a Zoom interview with The Korea Times.

He stressed that live concerts are way better than online streaming services, which simply aim to entertain people.

"People actually discovered that no stream and no Internet performance can be as good as a live performance. I focus more on live performances. Whatever content you put on the Internet is just for basic fun."

He chose to play "standard" repertoires of Bach, as those are all familiar to him, and thus can help him come back from the one-year hiatus from playing before audiences.

Pursuing goals of finding "inner natural expression" and "playing organically" so that people can go with the flow may have come from his pursuit of "perfection" in music, which he assumed may have come from both his inner "Koreanness," and the "being natural" that he has learned in Germany throughout his life.

"German culture goes for the most natural way. And Korean culture is a lot about the emotional way. For generations, people had to work very hard to succeed at this Korean perfection and therefore they had to repress their inner expressiveness, which I find quite scary … I can be very obsessed with perfection. But I learned that it doesn't help me play any better."

His priority had been the cello until 2019. However, the arrival of the new pandemic situation gave him a moment of enlightenment, raising a burning question about whether his way of living traveling all over the world as an artist is a career that can also benefit the Earth.

"Until the pandemic started, what we did was work a lot in the hope that we were going to get more work. That doesn't make any sense to do. So what we need to do is to focus on the content and necessity of the work. To put it simply, I could play 10 concerts in my city or I could play five concerts all over the world. But either way, it will basically come out the same."

He acknowledged the ecological cost of the emissions caused by air travel, as well as the toll of travel on the traveler's wellbeing.

"We cannot ruin the planet just for a random Beethoven sonata performance … The part about playing concerts we have been missing, but the other aspects of our lives have been much better. Our health is much better. I have a son who is not even 2 years old yet. We are at home basically all the time. We are having the most amazing time.

"Traveling all the time is not healthy at all and very expensive in general. I have probably destroyed a million trees so far by flying all over the world, which I cannot replant. Taking this all into account, is it really worth doing it? This is something I really want to question over the next year. I want to achieve in the next year an ecological point of view."