Earlier this month, classical music magazine Gramophone announced the winners of its annual awards, “the world’s most influential classical music prizes.” Of particular interest to Y concert-goers is the honor bestowed on cellist Steven Isserlis’s Bach Cello Suites for best instrumental recording:

Interviewed for Gramophone in June, Steven Isserlis confessed his true feelings about the Bach Cello Suites. He did not feel ready, he nervously admitted. He was not sure he ever would feel ready. But he was going to go ahead and finally record them anyway. If these works are the cellist’s personal Everest, then he gloriously reaches the summit with one of the finest accounts of the Suites on record. His interpretation of what they mean - Isserlis believes that the Suites are a cycle based on the life of Jesus - seems to lend his interpretation depth, pain and narrative urgency. They are also fabulously played. “This is the most wonderful cello-playing,” wrote Lindsay Kemp in his review, “surely among the most beautiful to have been heard in this demanding music, as well as the most musically alert and vivid.”

Isserlis hosts a Family Music series at the Y that offers humorous musical portraits which seek to entertain and educate. The life and music of J.S. Bach (Dec 9) and Joseph Haydn (May 11) are on the schedule. He is also playing his only New York recital this year at the Y with pianist Kirill Gerstein in December.

DVD of the year goes to My Life in Music: Julian Bream, a documentary about one of greatest classical guitarists of the 20th Century. The Gramophone reviewer called it “two of the most enjoyable hours you’ll spend in front of a television set.” In the spring, we will be celebrating his life with a 75th Birthday Tribute to Julian Bream.