Robert Schumann - Music for Cello (Sol Gabetta)

Information

Composer: Robert Schumann

• (01) Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102
• (06) Adagio und Allegro, Op. 70
• (08) Fantasiestücke, Op. 73
• (11) Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129

Sol Gabetta, cello
Bertrand Chamayou, piano

Basel Chamber Orchestra
Giovanni Antonini, conductor

Date: 2018
Label: Sony Classical

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

Two of today’s leading young cellists (born within six months of each other in 1981) alight almost simultaneously on Schumann’s Cello Concerto and the works for cello and piano. The two discs are nevertheless conceived, executed and presented in very different ways.

Sol Gabetta plays a pair of 18th-century instruments, and teams up with Bertrand Chamayou on a fortepiano from Schumann’s lifetime and with the gut strings and natural brass of the Basel Chamber Orchestra. She is recorded in two studio sessions two years apart and opens her programme with the chamber works, building up to the Concerto. Gautier Capuçon, on the other hand, opens with the Concerto in a concert performance from 2015 and couples it with the chamber works in versions from Martha Argerich’s Lugano festival dating from 2009 12.

The microphones focus intently on Gabetta’s Guadagnini in the Concerto, intimately capturing the instrument’s rich, throaty tone. Capuçon is placed a little further away, although Erato’s engineering faithfully reproduces the sheer range of sounds he draws from his instrument (the details of which are not identified in the disc packaging). Playing the two recordings back-to-back failed to make a choice between them any the easier: with Gabetta the conversation is one-to-one; with Capuçon it is a gripping oration. Antonini’s Swiss band, with their soft-toned woodwinds, are a match for Haitink’s ‘army of generals’, guided by the veteran conductor’s decades of experience.

Chamayou is beautifully responsive in the chamber works, for which Gabetta switches to a Goffriller. Argerich, for Capuçon, is simply unique and her contribution has been assessed in these pages before. Capuçon’s disc also has the benefit of the four Fantasy Pieces for piano trio, in which big brother Renaud joins the duo. There is much that is special in both discs, for all their points of correspondence and divergence. While the foregoing may decide you in favour of one or the other of these two quality products, your reviewer, with some relief, is pleased that he gets to keep both.

-- David Threasher, Gramophone

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era, and left an array of acclaimed music in virtually all the forms then known. Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder (songs for voice and piano); four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Schumann suffered from a lifelong mental disorder, and died in 1856 without having recovered from his illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schumann

***

Sol Gabetta (born 18 April 1981) is an Argentine cellist. She won her first competition at the age of 10, soon followed by the Natalia Gutman Award. Her teachers include Christine Waleska, Leo Viola, Ivan Monighetti, Piero Farulli and Ljerko Spiller. Gabetta won the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award in 2004. Other prizes have included the Gramophone Award for Young Artist of the Year in 2010, Echo Klassik Awards and Diapason d'Or. Gabetta has made commercial recordings for Sony and Deutsche Grammophon. Gabetta performs on a cello by G. B. Guadagnini dating from 1759.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Gabetta
http://www.solgabetta.com/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!