Artist Portrait: Sol Gabetta

Sol Gabetta. Even the name rolls off the tongue mellifluously. From her website, we find that this 29 year old Argentinean cellist, who is of French and Russian descent currently residing in Switzerland and continuing her cello studies in Berlin, has a couple of accolades to her name. She has won the International Tchaikovsky Competition (including the Natalia Gutman prize for best musical interpretation) and the ARD competition in Munich. However, the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award that she won in 2004 was the launching point for her career. Along with a sizeable prize money of 75,000CHF (around $72,000), she also won a concerto performance with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. Since then, her stock has continued to steadily rise.

Yet even with all these accomplishments, it is surprising that she is still relatively unknown amongst my musical friends. Granted, I had not heard of her either until a few months ago when I picked up her new recording of the Elgar Concerto. Like most people, I had assumed nobody was ever going to surpass Jacqueline du Pré's legendary 1965 recording. So I approached the recording more out of curiosity rather than trying to find a Goliath-slaying interpretation that would usurp du Pré's. Much to my surprise, that was exactly what I found. For the first time in a long time, I sat through the whole concerto, riveted and overwhelmed. The opening of the concerto feels like a punch in a gut; the sound is so penetrating and visceral. The wickedly difficult second movement is effortless in her hands. She plays with such lightness in touch and variety of colors that it felt like I was hearing the music for the first time. The way she paces the moments in the last movement before the opening recitative returns is incredibly affecting. I still get goosebumps and chills every time she finally replays the recitative. The other pieces on the CD (Dvorak Rondo, Respighi Andante con Varizioni, and a few Elgar miniatures) are also gems amongst the diamond.

Fascinated with her playing, I went out and bought her debut recording. My favorite recording of Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations and Saint-Saens Cello Concerto No.1 has been, for the past 10 years, Han-Na Chang's own 1996 debut recording. Not only does Gabetta benefit from better recording quality (in terms of acoustics and balance), her playing is more forceful than Chang's without ever sounding forced. It is as if Gabetta is asking the listener to meet her halfway, holding us accountable and asking us to listen with the same amount of emotional investment that she is performing with. Gabetta is a daredevil at times, throwing caution to the wind when the excitement calls for it. For example, the way she attacks those dastardly difficult octaves in the final moments of the coda of the Rococo Variations makes you sit at the edge of your seat.

Thanks to the power of YouTube, there is a great video of her performing the Elgar in its entirety. One of my favorites moments was watching her egg on the cello section in the last movement (0:34 in the third video) with the same abandoned swaying that Jacqueline du Pré was so famous for.