Prayer Sol Gabetta

• Ernest Bloch (1880-1959): From Jewish Life
• 1 I. Prayer 04:38
• 2 II. Supplication 02:52
• 3 III. Jewish Song 02:48
• Baal Shem
• 4 Baal Shem: II. Nigun 07:30
• 5 Méditation Hébraïque 06:49
• Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79
• 6 III. Lullaby (Arr. for Cello and String Orchestra) 03:28
• 7 V. A Warning (Arr. for Cello and String Orchestra) 01:02
• 8 VII. The Song of Misery (Arr. for Cello and String Orchestra) 01:37
• 9 X. The Young Girl's Song (Arr. for Cello and String Orchestra) 02:53
• Ernest Bloch: Schelomo
• 10 Schelomo 22:36
• Pablo Casals (1876-1973): Song of the Birds
• 11 Song of the Birds 03:42
• Total Runtime 59:55

Info for Prayer

“Prayer” offers the listener an intimate and meditative musical journey, with poignantly chosen pieces.

Sol was inspired to record this album from her experience of playing the piece “Prayer” by Swiss-born Jewish composer Ernest Bloch as an encore in her concerts – she always found the audience was deeply moved and longed for more music of this kind.

As she searched to expand this repertoire, she came across other pieces by Bloch, Dmitri Shostakovich and the cellist Pablo Casals.

The majority of the pieces on this CD are inspired by religious Jewish themes.

“[Song of the Birds is] played here with unforgettable lyrical intensity. The totally natural recording balance adds to the presence of the performers and this well-packaged and infromative CD is well worth having.” (Gramophone)

“I was especially struck by Gabetta’s willingness to vary her vibrato, sometimes accentuating it to mimic the wailing quality of a cantor’s lament, as on the long, drawn-out concluding C of the opening “Prayer”, and elsewhere fining down her tone to an unpulsed pianissimo. Her intonation is superb and she makes telling use of quarter-tone slides to enhance the intensity of yearning in the music.” (MusicWeb International)

Sol Gabetta, cello
Orchestre National de Lyon
Amsterdam Sinfonietta
Candida Thompson, violin
Leonard Slatkin, conductor

Sol Gabetta
The cellist Sol Gabetta was born in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1981 as the daughter of French and Russian parents. She was only ten when she won her first competition in Argentina, and has received many more awards since then: she won the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition and the ARD Competition in Munich, and has been awarded the Natalia Gutman Prize. In 2004 she created an international sensation when, as winner of the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award, she gave her début with the Vienna Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev at the Lucerne Festival.

From 1992–94 Sol Gabetta studied with a scholarship at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia in Madrid, after which she moved to Switzerland to pursue further studies with Ivan Monighetti at the Basel Academy of Music. After further years of study with David Geringas, she took her concert exam in 2006 at the Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule in Berlin.

In the last few years, Sol Gabetta has made guest appearances with the Munich Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, SWR Stuttgart, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, the Calgary and Seoul Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Het Residentie Orkest, the Trondheim Soloists and the orchestras of Euskadi, Teneriffa and Sevilla. She regularly gives concerts together with the Basel Chamber Orchestra.

Ms. Gabetta regularly appears at major festivals such as the Rheingau Music Festival, in Verbier, at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, the Schwetzingen Festival, the Bonn Beethoven Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade and the Saratoga Festival. She has also founded her own chamber music festival in Switzerland with the name "Solsberg", where she performs together with her chamber music partners, who include Henri Sigfridsson, Mihaela Ursuleasa, Baiba and Lauma Skride and Patricia Kopatchinkskaya.

Sol Gabetta records exclusively on the RCA label (Sony Music). Her début CD featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Ginastera, recorded with the Munich Radio Symphony Orchestra under Ari Rasilainen, shot straight to the top of the German classical charts, and brought the coveted Echo Klassik Prize for 2007 as instrumentalist of the year. Her second CD. with Vivaldi concertos recorded together with the Italian ensemble Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, was released in September 2007, and stayed in Germany's classical charts for over six months. 2008 saw the release of not one, but two CD's by Sol Gabetta. One featured a Shostakovich programme: the Cello concerto no.2 with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under Marc Albrecht, and the Sonata for cello & piano (with the pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa). The second CD is entitled "Cantabile" and contains opera arias and songs by Offenbach, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and others; on this album, Ms. Gabetta is accompanied by the Prague Philharmonic conducted by Charles Olivieri-Munroe. After it was released, the Shostakovich CD was awarded the coveted French music award Diapason d’Or by the clafssical music magazine Diapason and received the German Echo Klassik award 2009 as concerto recording of the year. In 2011 she received her third Echo Klassik award for her recording of the Elgar cello concerto.

A generous private grant from Hans K. Rahn enables Sol Gabetta to play one of the rare and valuable cellos built by G. B. Guadagnini; the instrument dates from 1759. She has held a teaching post at the Basel Academy of Music since October 2005.

This album contains no booklet.