Sol Gabetta
Sol Gabetta is an award-winning soloist who plays with ensembles from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Hagen Quartet. She collaborates with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and tours with regular recital partner, pianist Bertrand Chamayou. The duo’s latest recording, of Mendelssohn works for cello and piano, is out on Sony Classical on 19 Jan.
I was born in Argentina to a Russian-French mother and an Argentinian father with Italian roots, who introduced us to music very early. When I was nine, my mother looked for a music school in Europe for me and my older brother, who plays the violin. I went to the Reina Sofia school in Madrid, where I became a student of Russian cellist Ivan Monighetti. While my father stayed in Argentina with my other two siblings, we flew back and forth for holidays. Finally when Monighetti, my mentor and musical ‘father’, moved to the Musik-Akademie in Basel, the family moved to Switzerland. I loved my life there and fitted in so well. My head today is probably more European, but my heart is very much connected with my lovely birth country of Argentina!
I’ve just been touring with my good friend, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and we were remembering the pianist MIHAELA URSULEASA, with whom we played a lot in our twenties. Mihaela was an inspiration to me. She was an incredible musician – she was a little bit extreme, she had a softness of sound, but she was also like a tiger on the keyboard. You can hear the contrast in her Enescu recording with Pat, one of the few she made. Sadly she died at 33 and we have never found a partner like her. Pat and I are already like sisters, so it would be difficult for another pianist to come into this relationship.
I’ve also been playing with Giovanni Antonini, another long-time friend. I heard him first when he came to record the BEETHOVEN symphonies with the Kammerorchester Basel. Coming from a Baroque background, this Beethoven project was a new language for him and he was bringing so many ideas – transparency in the music, extremes in dynamics and articulations – and he was taking everything out of the score and reconstructing it. After years of playing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with him, Isabelle Faust and Kristian Bezuidenhout, I was influenced by this approach. Fifty or 60 years ago, Romantic German repertoire was interpreted quite heavily, then the revolution of Harnoncourt and Hogwood happened. Not everywhere – I played a Beethoven sonata in the US about 15 years ago, quite transparently and using
