A Recital by Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin and
Sol Gabetta cello

A Recital by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin

and Sol Gabetta, cello

By Joel Rust

The string quartet is the characteristic ensemble for chamber music. Since Haydn cemented the place of the medium by writing sixty-eight works for it, almost every composer has produced at least one example; Verdi even produced his only substantial instrumental work for its combination of two violins, viola, and cello. The four voices provide enough opportunities for rich harmonies and complex interactions, but their limited number and similar sound encourage an economy of compositional thought that is flexible and expressive.

By contrast, the string trio—with one fewer violin—is regarded as a confounding medium with its sparer, more exposed texture. And reducing the ensemble one further, to only violin and cello, is very rare. There are only two established masterpieces in the medium, and both are featured in this program: Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello in A minor and Zoltán Kodály’s Duo in D minor, Opus 7. Duo works conventionally pair a melodic instrument, such as the violin or cello, with a chordal instrument, usually the piano, affording both the intimacy of close communication and a straightforward way of creating a full sound. Works for the present lineup place great demands on the performers.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta have taken on this challenge and have done so not with trepidation but with joy. The two met when they played together at a house concert, and Gabetta says that “immediately we had a very special connection . . . it was like a new flower born at that moment.” They have been performing as a duo for over a decade, releasing the critically acclaimed album Sol & Pat in 2021. As well as performing chamber music, they have been soloists in several double concertos, including one written by Kopatchinskaja herself last year.

Their repertoire stretches from the Baroque to the present day; the opening piece of the program, Leclair’s Tambourin, is among the oldest pieces they play together, dating from the mid-eighteenth century. Performances of Baroque music—especially ones with an unconventional approach, such as this one—increasingly draw upon “historically informed” techniques to create performances closer to what was played in the composer’s time. Kopatchinskaja (like Gabetta) is interested in these ideas, but ultimately declares that “I just make music in the very moment; it’s about magic . . . I don’t want to be right or wrong or to give somebody a lesson.” Indeed, this version of Tambourin is based on an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler, which substantially changed the original movement (from the third of Leclair’s Sonatas, Opus 9) to create this freestanding piece.

Jörg Widmann’s 24 Duos are witty, engaging miniatures that show off the many colors of the instruments. When the full cycle is performed, “Toccatina all’inglese” is its thrilling conclusion, with the quotation providing its “Englishness” becoming increasingly apparent through its short duration. The “Valse bavaroise” is a sophisticated parody of a waltz, named for crème bavaroise, a light custard and whipped cream-based dessert; at one point, the cello’s melody soars far above the violin, which provides the temporarily plodding accompaniment. After reading these pieces for the first time, Kopatchinskaja said: “We knew straight off—we simply have to play this!”

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in G major is excerpted from another cycle of twenty-four: the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One. The violin plays the right-hand part with the bow, and the pizzicato cello plays the left-hand by plucking the strings with the finger rather than bowing at all; at first the violin plays the melody and the cello simply accompanies, but then the texture reverses and the pizzicato sound carries the melody, supported by the bowed violin. The arrangements of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, BWV 772–786, follow a similar pattern of finding new ways to bring his simple, delicate lines to life. One of J. S. Bach’s sons, C.P.E. Bach, is also represented in a two-part composition—Presto for Keyboard in C minor—which is played entirely pizzicato. While the influence of the father is certainly audible, the generational shift from the beautiful geometry of the Baroque era to the elegant expressivity of the Classical era can also be felt.

Francisco Coll’s Rizoma is closely related to the first and last sections of the double concerto he wrote for Kopatchinskaja, Gabetta, and the Camerata Bern, Les Plaisirs Illuminés (Illuminated Pleasures). The concerto is named after a Dalí painting that depicts several screens displaying strange images amidst a bleak landscape. Rizoma—rhizomes—are the underground stems of plants, which can sometimes span great distances and interlink, analogously to the invisible connections between the objects in Dalí’s surrealist painting. Rizoma begins enigmatically with the concluding material of Les Plaisirs Illuminés and concludes with its beginning. Removed from the central movements and the other instruments, its network of roots has regrown differently.

Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello was dedicated to the memory of Debussy, whose death in 1918 left Ravel as France’s leading composer; while formerly anathema to its conservative musical culture (even being expelled from the Conservatoire de Paris in 1895), Ravel was eventually offered, but refused, the Légion d’honneur. While nowadays frequently grouped together, Ravel’s and Debussy’s mutual respect was cool and somewhat distant; but, in calling this work a sonata, Ravel pays tribute to a focus of Debussy’s final years—a series of six sonatas for various groups of instruments, of which only the first three were completed.

Ravel became disillusioned by the First World War, feeling weakened and disarmed by the scorn that colleagues heaped upon his new status in the establishment. Satie even quipped “Ravel refuses the Légion d’honneur, but all his music accepts it.” These factors converged to make him far less productive in this stage of his life. And his musical style transformed also; he said of this Sonata “the music is stripped down to the bone. The allure of harmony is rejected and increasingly there is a return of emphasis on melody.”

For the composer of Daphnis et Chloé, “stripped down to the bone” is relative: the richness of sound that he conjures from the eight strings of the two instruments is extraordinary. But he focuses his palette more often on a more limited and precise range of colors. In particular he is interested in the subtle contrasts between the cello’s high register and the violin’s low register, whose pitches overlap. The work also features a new tautness of form; the four movements are bound together by common musical material—especially the major-minor contrast set up in the first two bars—harkening back to Debussy’s Violin Sonata, whose first and last movements begin with the same melody interpreted in contrasting ways.

Kopatchinskaja says: “I find established repertoire much more difficult than new. With dead composers, one has to radically renew one’s way of listening.” This renewal is evidenced in the Sonata; in its second movement, the two instruments trade off solos that, in these musicians’ interpretations, draw upon fiddle playing and the blues (which features more explicitly in Ravel’s Violin Sonata). This is not a problem the musicians encounter playing Kopatchinskaja’s own music, published under the pen name PatKop. Ghiribizzi (Whims), shares a name with a series of short pieces Paganini wrote for his second instrument, the guitar. These very short works condense a lifetime’s understanding of string instruments into bursts of color and energy.

Ligeti and Xenakis are, aside from Ravel and Kodály, two of the best-known composers to have written for the violin-cello duo. Both of their works are slight but written at fascinating points of their musical journeys. Ligeti’s Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg (written as a birthday present) from 1982 was one of the few works he composed in the fallow period after completing his opera Le Grand Macabre in 1977. With its focus on the violin’s open strings, it is perhaps possible to hear the beginnings of the interests that would spur his Violin Concerto a decade later. Xenakis’s Dhipli Zyia is an unpublished early work dating from 1951. His trademark stochastic textures and clouds of glissandi generated by mathematical formulae are absent, but the composer’s interests in the power of sonority and in Greek folk music (which would surface again in works such as Nomos Alpha) are very much in evidence.

Kodály’s Duo in D minor, Opus 7 (1914) shows a great understanding of thrilling, visceral effects for strings without other accompaniment; his Sonata for Solo Cello, written just after the present Duo, is the most famous work in that medium other than Bach’s. Along with his compatriot Béla Bartók, Kodály was an avid admirer and collector of folk music (especially that of his native Hungary), and this shines through in the first movement’s unconventional scales and the last movement’s energetic rhythms. But the two central movements tell a different story. The folksy gestures are still present, but fragmented and fighting against an atmosphere of gloom; war—the same war that would contribute to Ravel’s crisis and his Sonata—was beginning.

Kopatchinskaja describes playing in a duo with Gabetta as “telling a story which is written down, but we have to find how to tell it in every venue, every day, in a new way. . . it’s not engraving in stone.” Their approach to the Kodály Duo is a key example of this; a more extroverted piece than most of the program, its narrative can be shaped in many convincing ways. This flexibility responds well to the charisma of the players. Rich in gesture, color, and melody, the work is an ideal canvas for these two extraordinary musicians to display their individual but closely bonded virtuosities. — © Joel Rust

Cellist Sol Gabetta is one of the leading soloists of our time. A sought-after guest artist at leading festivals, she was the star artist at Lucerne Festival where she appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and the Concertgebouw. She continues drawing inspiration from a wide circle of collaborators at the Solsberg Festival, which flourishes under her commited artistic direction. Recent highlights include a return to the United States for performances with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Klaus Mäkelä. Gabetta recently premiered a cello concerto by Francisco Coll that was newly commissioned especially for her. Chamber music is at the core of Gabetta’s work, visible in her trio recitals with Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov, her tour with Bertrand Chamayou through Europe, and performances with Gabetta’s fellow “inventor,” the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, in which they present known and unknown works. She continues to build her extensive discography with Sony Classical. Recent releases include a recording of late Schumann works and a live recording of cello concertos by Elgar and Martinů with the Berliner Philharmoniker. She performs on several Italian master instruments from the early 18th century, including the 1730 cello by Matteo Goffriller of Venice provided to her by Atelier Cels Paris that she plays in Aspen.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s focus is to get to the heart of the music, to its meaning for us—now and here. With a combination of depth, brilliance, and humor, Kopatchinskaja brings an inimitable sense of theatrics to her music. Kopatchinskaja’s distinctive approach always conveys the core of the work, whether it is with an out-of-the-box performance of a traditional classic or with an original staged project she presents as a dramaturge for experimental performance. A boundary-crosser who thrives on the challenge of musical experiments and describes contemporary music as her lifeblood, her absolute priority is music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the collaboration with living composers such as Francisco Coll, Luca Francesconi, Michael Hersch, Márton Illés, György Kurtág, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Aureliano Cattaneo, Stefano Gervasoni, and many others. Kopatchinskaja directs staged concerts at venues on both sides of the Atlantic and collaborates with leading orchestras, conductors, and festivals worldwide. Since the 2024–25 season she has served as the Artistic Partner of the SWR Symphony Orchestra. A virtuoso, storyteller, and all-around phenomenon, her artistic direction involves designing her own programs, including both established concert formats and innovative theatrical and interdisciplinary approaches. Kopatchinskaja’s discography includes over 30 recordings, among them the Grammy award-winning Death and the Maiden with Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Recent CD releases have included Les Plaisirs Illuminés with Sol Gabetta and Camerata Bern, which was saluted with a BBC Music Magazine award, and Le monde selon George Antheil with Joonas Ahonen (both on Alpha Classics).