Norman Lebrecht, noted British commentator on music and cultural affairs, recently spoke with cellist Steven Isserlis about “a new hero for the cello.”

The classical cello has gone into personality deficit. In a celebrity-driven culture, an art without a visible figurehead risks media oblivion.

I put this thought the other day to Steven Isserlis, the quirky, curly British cellist who countered that maybe the cello needs a different set of values these days, less lofty and heroic, more practical and domestic. Isserlis, 50 this year, is an engaging mix of English inhibition and artistic swagger, self-deprecation and acute self-awareness.

They go on to describe how it’s tougher to be a cellist these days but Isserlis reveals what keeps him going.

One of his favourite gigs is a children’s series that he runs at the 92nd Street Y in New York, a place where kids of all ages drop in to hear Isserlis and such chums as Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk, teach, play and tell jokes. He has published two light-hearted lives of composers for children and his Wigmore Hall/Alte Oper series is a seasonal fulcrum of musical concentration. In Cornwall each summer, at Prussia Cove, he gives seminars on the values of friendship and conversation, the bedrock of chamber music.

‘Every time I go to a boring classical concert I feel so angry,’ he says. ‘It reinforces people’s clichéd and inaccurate view of what we do.’

So what’s the solution? ‘Play better. If you play better, people will listen better. If they listen, they will feel better.’

The last children’s music concert of the 2007-08 season at the Y is a program on The Life and Music of Joseph Haydn featuring Isserlis, pianist Jeremy Denk and the Orion String Quartet on May 11.

Related: In Focus: Steven Isserlis & the Romantic Generation and 2008-09 Family Music Series

Previously: Gramophone Classical Music Award for Steven Isserlis and “Utterly Silent Awe” for the Orion String Quartet