''Unfortunately, and unbelievably, Mozart wrote concertos for just about every instrument but the cello,'' lamented the cellist Mischa Maisky, musing on his first appearances at Mostly Mozart, scheduled to take place Friday and Saturday evenings at Avery Fisher Hall.
For want of Mozart, Mr. Maisky will play Haydn's Concerto in C major. ''In the cello repertory, Haydn is as close as you come to Mozart,'' he says, ''and of the Haydn cello concertos, the one in C major is the more natural, and the easier to comprehend.''
Mr. Maisky has emerged in recent years as a dark horse among his generation of cellists. He was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, and from 1966 to 1970 he studied under Mstislav Rostropovich in Moscow. He emigrated to Israel in 1972 after some rough treatment that included a jail term, ostensibly for a currency infraction. In 1973, he won the Gaspar Cassado International Cello Competition in Florence and turned up briefly in New York to make a concerto debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony at a Carnegie Hall benefit concert for the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. And in 1974, he studied with Gregor Piatigorsky in California.
It was another decade before New York concertgoers heard from him again; but word about him had spread in musical circles. In Europe, he began collaborating regularly in chamber music with the violinist Gidon Kremer and the pianists Radu Lupu, Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire; and he made the first in a series of disks for Deutsche Grammophon, a Brahms Double Concerto with Mr. Kremer, Leonard Bernstein, and the Vienna Philharmonic. When he returned to New York in February 1984, to make his recital debut, his partner was the pianist Peter Serkin. Since then, Mr. Maisky has started to make greater inroads here.
In recital, the cellist makes an immediately striking impression, partly because of his leonine mane and his penchant for brightly colored silk shirts, open at the neck; but also, one hopes, because he makes it clear from the outset that he means business. He strides briskly across the stage, plants his cello in front of him, launches into his opening work (typically a Bach unaccompanied suite) the second he hits his chair, and performs with a level of fire and intensity that does not let up for the rest of the evening.
Mr. Maisky is decidedly of the Romantic school. Even in Bach - especially there, in fact - his readings are full of coloristic nuance and dynamic shape. They also seem to change a good deal. His account of Bach's Suite No. 3 in a 92d Street Y recital last November had a topography quite different from that of the performance he recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in 1985. Those differences, he says, and others are likely to show up in a new recording of the six suites made for CD Video release.
''I believe my interpretations change, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously,'' he says. ''Anyway, I believe there are a million different ways to play great music, and all are valid except two: to play it ugly, or to play it boring.''
Mr. Maisky, who lives in Brussels but is an Israeli citizen, began playing the cello when he was 8 years old and living in Riga. His older sister played the violin. His brother started on the violin but switched to organ and harpsichord after becoming infatuated with Bach; he later became a musicologist, and he performed with Mr. Maisky until he was killed in an automobile accident eight years ago.
''When it was my turn to take up an instrument,'' Mr. Maisky says, ''my mother said, 'Enough, I want one normal child.' So I wasn't supposed to be a musician. But I announced that I was going to play the cello. I'm not sure why. Everyone told me how crazy that was, because I was a hyperactive child, and I mainly liked to play soccer. Nobody could imagine me sitting down and playing the cello. But I worked very hard at it.''
In 1962, his family moved to Leningrad, where he finished his primary musical training. In 1966, he won prizes in the All Russia Competition and the Tchaikovsky Competition. ''I was the only cellist at the Tchaikovsky Competition that year who was not a student of Rostropovich,'' Mr. Maisky says, ''and he wanted to correct this, so he invited me to Moscow to study with him. That had been my dream all my life.
''He was a remarkable teacher. In those days, he was traveling a lot, so there would be long periods when he was absent. But when he was there, he created an unbelievable, electrifying energy. The lessons were irregular, but extremely inspiring. I don't remember him discussing technique, or cello playing as such, once in the four years I studied with him. And it was exactly the same with Piatigorsky. That was the remarkable thing.
''Both were absolutely the greatest teachers I could imagine. They were open-minded enough to realize that there are many ways to play the instrument, and that if you become obsessed with technique, the result will be a distortion of the music. So their main ideas seemed to be to make the student open his ears and eyes and imagination, and to get as close as possible to what the composer wanted to say with his music. They believed that if a student was talented enough, he would find his own way to reach his goal.''
Before he left the Soviet Union, Mr. Maisky had to run a gauntlet unusual even by Soviet emigre standards. His problems began in 1969, when his sister emigrated to Israel.
''It was obvious to the authorities that sooner or later I would do the same,'' he recalls. ''In the Soviet Union, every Jewish person is a potential emigre; and once you have a relative abroad, it is assumed you will follow. It angered them that I did not leave when my sister did, because they realized I wanted to finish my education with Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory, and that then I would leave. They were probably right. But since I was a good student, they couldn't kick me out for no reason. So they made my life difficult, canceling concerts and refusing to let me play abroad. But I felt that unless something dramatic happened, I would finish my studies.''
Something dramatic happened. ''When I began studying with Rostropovich,'' Mr. Maisky explains, ''it seemed to me that the lessons were so incredibly rich that it was impossible for normal human beings like us little students to absorb them. So I spent all the money I won at the Tchaikovsky Competition on a second-hand tape recorder. It was well-known that I recorded the lessons; I even arranged public playings of the tapes.
''By 1970, this tape recorder was in very bad shape, so I began looking for a new one. But in the Soviet Union you don't just walk into a store and buy this sort of thing. I went back to the second-hand shop, and in front of the shop there was an open black market. Someone approached me and asked me what I was looking for, which was very normal. He didn't have a tape recorder, but he had certificates that could be used in special shops to buy things that are not usually available.''
The certificates were intended to be bought by foreigners with hard currency, and Mr. Maisky, in buying them with rubles, committed an infraction. ''When I brought the certificates to the shop to buy the tape recorder, I was duly arrested. If I hadn't been so naive, I could have said that I found the certificates. Nobody would have believed me, but they would not have been able to do anything. But I didn't think I did anything wrong. I didn't steal from anyone. So I told the truth.
''I spent four months in jail,'' he continues, ''and then 14 months in enforced labor, trying to build Communism with a shovel. It was just outside Gorky - not in Siberia, but bad enough.''
When his sentence was finished, he had himself committed to a mental hospital. ''If I had not done so,'' he says, ''they would have put me in the army. That would have been another three years of a different kind of jail, and then they could refuse to let me emigrate because I might have seen some secret installations. So I found an influential Jewish psychiatrist, explained my case, and was committed for two months.''
By the time he was released, he had not seen his cello for two years. He attempted to gain readmission to the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories without success. ''They pretty much arranged it so that I had to leave.''
He left the Soviet Union, therefore, and quickly established a foothold in Israel. He also secured an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship for study with Piatigorsky, and spent three and a half months working with the cellist in California.
''That was the best time of my life,'' he says. ''Please don't misunderstand: I am not implying that Piatigorsky was a better teacher than Rostropovich. But I think that in 1974 I was a better student. I was quite a bit older. I had more life experience. The ordeal I had been through had changed my life, and changed me as a human being.
''We had an extremely close, intense relationship. We saw each other every day. I would play for him, and we played duos, and chess. We went for walks, and shared meals. I didn't speak a word of English, and he loved to speak Russian - a beautiful kind of Russian that you don't hear anymore. He was already very ill. The doctors had not discovered it yet, but he felt it strongly. And I think that for him our time together was a last chance to share his rich experience as a musician, a cellist and a teacher, with someone who was very anxious to take it.''
After his stay with Piatigorsky, Mr. Maisky returned to Israel, which remained his home base until 1978, when he married an American cellist he met in Lisbon, and moved to Paris. By the time his first recordings appeared, in 1983, his European career was flourishing. Today, he says, he is playing 100 concerts a season, and trying to cut back to spend more time with his family, which now includes two infants.
He has also become slightly rebellious, by the standards of the classical-music world. ''I always felt funny wearing the penguin suit,'' he says of concert dress, ''and I believe that one of the problems of classical music not being popular enough is that the traditional outfit makes some young people think of the music as stuffy and old-fashioned, without even hearing it.''
For concertos, his approach is mildly subversive. ''I don't wear full tails,'' he explains, ''because I move around a lot when I play, and they get under me. So I found a short jacket, and since I face the audience, you hardly notice. And for a 15-minute concerto, I can afford to wear a bow tie.''
In recital, though, his style is more flamboyant. He drops the jacket and tie in favor of loose-fitting silk shirts, which he changes between pieces.
''The truth is, I am not trying to revolt. It's not as if I'm wearing jeans. It's a question of comfort. I am a performer who uses a lot of energy onstage, and I sweat a lot. That affects my playing, because it's uncomfortable, and it's bad for the cello to get wet. I tried to solve this problem other ways. I even tried taking salt pills, which don't work and aren't good for you. So I designed these shirts, and had several made so that I could change to a dry one between pieces.
''Since I was changing anyway, I thought, why not change colors? And I began thinking about the relationship between the colors and the music. When I play three Bach suites now, I wear three different color shirts. But then, I also use three bows, and nobody notices that.'' BACH, HAYDN AND POINTS ROMANTIC
In six years of recording, Mischa Maisky has built a compact but impressive discography. Of greatest interest in connection with his Mostly Mozart debut on Friday is a disk of Haydn concertos, recorded live with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, in which he doubles as conductor and soloist (DG 419 786-2; CD only). There he plays the Concerto in C with both elegance and drive. In the companion D major work Mr. Maisky takes the Allegro Moderato at a clip comfortable enough to suit the tempo marking, but brisk enough to make the movement sound tauter than in most versions. Included, too, is Thomas Zehetmair's workable, persuasive transcription of the Violin Concerto in G (Hob. VIIa:4).
Mr. Maisky has turned his hand to a good deal of Romantic repertory. There is a sweetly wistful, rich-toned performance of the Schumann cello concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic (coupled with the Second Symphony; DG 419 190; CD and cassette). Some of the intensity Mr. Maisky brings to his performances can be seen in the CD Video of his collaboration with Gidon Kremer and Mr. Bernstein in the Brahms Double Concerto (DG 072 203-1; audio only, CD 410 031-2). There are also some lovely collaborations with Martha Argerich - most notably a songful Schubert Arpeggione Sonata (with Schumann's ''Fantasiestucke'' and ''Stucke im Volkston''; Philips 412 230; all three formats) and steamy, driven renderings of the Franck and Debussy Sonatas (EMI HMV import LP, ASD 4334).
Mr. Maisky is at his best, however, in Bach. His recording of the gamba sonatas with Ms. Argerich (DG 415 471; CD and cassette) finds a good common ground between gracefulness and determination; and his traversal of the six solo cello suites (DG 415 416; all three formats) offers magic, passion, insight and some marvelous manipulation of the cello's tone and of the shapes of Bach's lines.