Robert Schumann - Music for Cello (Sol Gabetta)

Information

Composer: Robert Schumann

• Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102
• Adagio und Allegro, Op. 70
• Fantasiestücke, Op. 73
• Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129

Sol Gabetta, cello

Bertrand Chamayou, piano

Basel Chamber Orchestra

Giovanni Antonini, conductor

Date: 2018

Label: Sony

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Review

Beware first impressions. Listening to Sol Gabetta’s lean, volatile, often sharply featured Schumann you might assume that her purpose is polemical. Let’s forget all that Romantic dreaminess, pale lilies dripping with tears, and welcome back Mephistopheles, the wickedly ingenious, sometimes grotesque prankster who so troubled Clara Schumann. The opening of the Adagio und Allegro, almost vibrato-less and more edgily plaintive than sweetly caressing, seems to seal the deal.

But keep listening and Gabetta's powers of persuasion do begin to work a transformation. Gone is the notion of Schumann as a kind of German Romantic Fotherington-Thomas – and perhaps that’s no bad thing. Have we focused too much on the vulnerability, the exquisitely pained tenderness, and lost the demonic element in Schumann? Certainly she makes a remarkable case for her re-viewing of the Cello Concerto, which emerges as nervous, mercurial, more brilliantly lateral in its thinking than in any other recording I can remember. Even the orchestration seems more incisive, more in keeping with the cello’s thought-processes under Giovanni Antonini’s sympathetic direction, and with the less plush, more wiry and transparent sound of the period instruments. The finale holds the attention particularly well – the dreamlike logic goes on almost to the end, and what a fascinating, unsettling dream it is. Going back to Steven Isserlis though, I feel he manages to convey a lot of this too, though with much more tenderness. His devil has a heart too. Gabetta feels a shade more – ruthless? But her fascinatingly fresh approach needs to be experienced. Your conception of Schumann may never be quite the same again.

— Stephen Johnson

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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.

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Sol Gabetta (born 18 April 1981) is an Argentine cellist. She won the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award in 2004, the Gramophone Award for Young Artist of the Year in 2010, and the Würth Prize of Jeunesses Musicales Germany in 2012. Gabetta received the Diapason d'Or for her recordings of Haydn, Mozart and Elgar cello concerti, as well as works by Tchaikovsky and Ginastera. She has made commercial recordings for Sony and Deutsche Grammophon. Gabetta performs on a cello by G. B. Guadagnini dating from 1759. She resides in Switzerland and has been teaching cello at the Basel Music Academy since 2005.

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