Presented by Barry Moore, The Qobuz Minute sweeps you away to the 4 corners of the musical universe to bring you an eclectic mix of today's brightest talents. Jazz, Electro, Classical, World music ... Sol Gabetta
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Sol Gabetta has established herself as one of the most promising cellists to emerge in the first decade of the 21st century, with a substantial international career as a soloist and with a growing number of recordings. While she has drawn most attention for her performances of the standard concerto and chamber music repertoire, she has also championed contemporary works by composers as diverse as Takemitsu, Ligeti, Gubaidulina, Rihm, and Vasks. Born in Argentina to parents of French and Russian heritage, Gabetta moved to Spain to study when she was 12. She went on to win a number of major international competitions, including the Natalia Gutman Award at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the ARD competition in Munich. She came to wide international attention when she played with the Vienna Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev at the 2004 Lucerne Festival as a result of winning the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award. She has performed with some of the world's leading orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, under conductors such as Neeme Järvi, Charles Dutoit, Leonard Slatkin, and Christoph Eschenbach. She records for Sony, and her CDs have received numerous honors including three Echo Klassik Awards and a Diapason d'Or. Her recordings feature primarily concertos from the standard repertoire by composers such as Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Shostakovich, Ginastera, and Barber. Gabetta makes her home in Switzerland. In 2005 she began teaching at the Musikhochschule in Basel, and in 2006 founded the Solsberg festival, an annual series of concerts of chamber music.
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Cello Concertos - Released November 30, 2018 | Sony Classical
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4F de Télérama -
Diapason d'or / Arte -
Le Choix de France Musique
Cellist Sol Gabetta and her almost-favourite pianist, Bertrand Chamayou, focus here on Schumann's all too rare repertoire for cello and piano. And once again, none of these pieces are intended a priori for cello, even though the original scores do propose the instrument as a possible alternative to the clarinet in Fantasy Pieces or the horn in Adagio and Allegro. It was only with Five Pieces in Folk Style that Schumann immediately thought of the cello! Here, Chamayou plays on a Viennese fortepiano by Streicher, dated from 1847 - three or four years after the composition of these three works. The Concerto for cello is accompanied by the Basel Chamber Orchestra, who also play on instruments from the romantic era, giving a more hushed yet incisive sound for the attacks. There’s more of an emphasis on the woodwind section as well, in contrast to the over-inflated string ensemble that so many modern orchestras offer up. © SM/Qobuz
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Cello Concertos - Released November 30, 2018 | Sony Classical
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Choc de Classica
Looking at the program here, you may not have been aware that Robert Schumann contributed so many works to the cello repertory. He didn't; the two central works were originally written for other instruments and are presented here in versions for cello and piano. Nevertheless, there is no hint of the program being scraped together. This is because Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has assembled a group of mostly late Schumann works (the Fantasy Pieces, Op. 73, might be called transitional) that aren't terribly common, probably have never been heard together before, and offer all kinds of insight into the late Schumann style that heavily influenced the young Brahms. The contrapuntally dense Konzertstück für Cello und Orchester, Op. 129, generally rendered as Cello concerto in English, was one such work; it's a thorny work that Schumann's contemporaries wouldn't touch, but Brahms would later write concertos that would similarly be accused of not favoring the soloist enough, but that continued to rethink the concerto form. The work gets a fine performance here, influenced by historical-instrument readings, from Gabetta and the Kammerorchester Basel under Gabetta's frequent collaborator Giovanni Antonini. Sample the first movement for an idea of the clarity they bring to Schumann's gnarly textures. Of course, another periodic aspect of the Brahms style was an interest in folk-like melodies, and here that's anticipated by a very rarely heard Schumann work, the Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102 (Five Pieces in Folk Style). This one is worth the price on its own; the five works move progressively away from folk models, and really the work is unlike anything else in the repertory. The two middle works are played well enough by the cello, and all in all this is a fine, even revelatory Schumann recital even if the cello concerto, recorded two years earlier than the other pieces, seems to inhabit a different sonic world.
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Classical - Released October 17, 2014 | Sony Classical
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The fast-rising Argentine-Swiss cellist Sol Gabetta took the name of this recital from the "Prayer" movement of Ernest Bloch's From Jewish Life, which she has performed as an encore to great success and to an obvious emotional reaction from audiences. She went in search of similar music, found the path partially trodden by Pablo Casals, and put together a program that is actually quite novel -- of the music on the album, only Bloch's Schelomo (track 10) is really common -- and yet seems as though it's always been there. Tribute is paid to Casals not only in the emotive playing, but in the presence of El Cant dels Ocells (The Song of the Birds), one of several Casals compositions deserving of more frequent performance. The most unusual entry here, and perhaps the least successful one, is the selection of pieces from Shostakovich's song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, arranged here for cello and orchestra by Mikhail Bronner. It seems to be part of the general mood, but it's not; despite the theme, it's pure postwar Shostakovich, and Gabetta doesn't quite catch its note of tension. The much-recorded Schelomo, however, fares very well here, even with a switch in orchestra, venue, and conductor. As usual, a bracingly fresh program from this charismatic and intelligent cellist.
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Classical - Released October 5, 2012 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
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Classical - Released November 4, 2016 | Sony Classical
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5 de Diapason
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Concertos - Released September 1, 2011 | Sony Classical
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Concertos - Released December 27, 2010 | RCA Red Seal
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Classical - Released November 4, 2016 | Sony Classical
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Classical - Released August 18, 2006 | RCA Red Seal
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Classical - Released July 8, 2016 | Sony Classical
The young Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has emerged at the top of the heap with some speed in the 2010s. She merits the double greatest-hits album represented by this release, and it will be welcomed by listeners who haven't quite focused on her meteoric career. You get only one full-scale concerto, but it's a good one: Gabetta has a real way with Elgar, and the compilers did well to feature his music on most of disc one. You get the fresh interpretations of repertory recital and encore pieces that have really endeared Gabetta to ordinary concertgoers. Sample the marvelous Fauré Pavane, Op. 50, an excellent example of how with Gabetta, less is often more. Perfect control rather than gushing melody carries the load, and the results are hypnotic. Most of the second CD is made up of these short pieces, and they never cloy. You get an example of Gabetta's activities in the field of contemporary music: the lovely Musique du Soir pour violoncelle et orgue by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks is not as well known as the cello concerto Vasks wrote for her, but it's a strong entry in the Baltic minimalist field. And you get a sample of Gabetta's popular Vivaldi projects. The downsides are few. There's really no need for the transcribed operatic arias, and the remastering of these diverse sources is jarring in a few cases. Not the end of the story on Gabetta, but this can be recommended to those wanting an introduction to this major new star.
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Classical - Released February 13, 2015 | Sony Classical
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Classical - Released October 12, 2011 | RCA Red Seal
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Concertos - Released August 13, 2009 | RCA Red Seal
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Concertos - Released September 3, 2009 | RCA Red Seal
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Classical - Released September 11, 2015 | Sony Classical
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Classical - Released August 17, 2012 | Sony Classical
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Classical - Released September 4, 2008 | RCA Red Seal
For this album, Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has chosen a program of arrangements of vocal music, the majority of which come from French opera. The result is a pleasant if plain recital. Most of the selections are straight transcriptions in which the cello simply plays the vocal line, accompanied by orchestra. Gabetta's playing is warmly lyrical but unexceptional, and not much personality or interpretive originality comes across. Even a showstopper like the Seguidilla from Carmen, which ought to be an opportunity for flamboyant display (and it's certainly treated that way by the singers) is blandly straightforward. The Prague Philharmonic, led by Charles Olivieri-Munroe, offers a supportive accompaniment. The piece that's the most fun is an arrangement of Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia, made by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for cello and piano. It is quite a departure from Rossini and is full of zany surprises, allowing Gabetta to display some virtuosity. The album is most likely to be of interest to listeners looking for mellow, restful selections that could be used as background music.
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Classical - Released July 5, 2006 | RCA Red Seal
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Classical - Released August 17, 2012 | Sony Classical
With this recording Argentine-Swiss cellist Sol Gabetta completes her pair of Shostakovich's cello concertos, recorded in reverse order. Perhaps she has simply been aware of Shostakovich's still growing popularity, or perhaps she felt it was a unique challenge to apply her somewhat impetuous style to Shostakovich, who could certainly be called sober and perhaps even dour. This is a strong reading of the Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 107, which was composed in 1959 and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich. It's probably preferable to Gabetta's recording of the second concerto, which doesn't quite catch Shostakovich's expansive late manner. Here she is in her element, with plenty of facility in the spectacular cadenza that introduces the finale, and an interpretation that stands out in comparison with Russian ones. As is her way, Gabetta plays fast and loose with tempi, but what she finds here is one of the Shostakovich works that seem to be rather angry assertions of identity, underlined by the dense repetitions of the D-S-C-H motif (in the German note-naming system, "Es" is E flat), which is, unusually, transposed and manipulated through the eventful opening movement. Another attractive feature of the release is the sympathy between the young and charismatic Gabetta, who seems to be getting the full star treatment from Sony Classical, and conductor Lorin Maazel, leading the Munich Philharmonic and turning the orchestra's percussion section loose in some loud noises that fit very well with what Gabetta is trying to do. There are some reservations to be had: the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 19, with pianist Olga Kern, makes an unconvincing conclusion. And it's not quite clear in what sense the Shostakovich was a "live" recording if it was recorded over three days in Munich. But this is in the main a strong outing by an exciting developing artist.
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Classical - Released October 17, 2008 | RCA Red Seal
For this album, Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has chosen a program of arrangements of vocal music, the majority of which come from French opera. The result is a pleasant if plain recital. Most of the selections are straight transcriptions in which the cello simply plays the vocal line, accompanied by orchestra. Gabetta's playing is warmly lyrical but unexceptional, and not much personality or interpretive originality comes across. Even a showstopper like the Seguidilla from Carmen, which ought to be an opportunity for flamboyant display (and it's certainly treated that way by the singers) is blandly straightforward. The Prague Philharmonic, led by Charles Olivieri-Munroe, offers a supportive accompaniment. The piece that's the most fun is an arrangement of Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia, made by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for cello and piano. It is quite a departure from Rossini and is full of zany surprises, allowing Gabetta to display some virtuosity. The album is most likely to be of interest to listeners looking for mellow, restful selections that could be used as background music.
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Sol Gabetta in the magazine
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The Qobuz Minute #31
Presented by Barry Moore, The Qobuz Minute sweeps you away to the 4 corners of the musical universe to bring you an eclectic mix of today's brightest talents. Jazz, Electro, Classical, World music ...