TWO’S COMPANY

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Sol Gabetta’s new recording is the culmination of many years of music making and friendship, as the pair tell Charlotte Gardner

Talk about being spoilt. The album Plaisirs illuminés (released earlier this year) from cellist Sol Gabetta and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja felt on paper almost too good to be true: an equal-footing collaboration between two of the world’s biggest string soloists that included a brand new double concerto for them by young Spanish composer Francisco Coll. It delivered on its promise in spades, as David Kettle’s review in these pages trumpeted (March 2021). Yet it turns out that this wasn’t all they had up their sleeves, because now they’re releasing Sol & Pat, a cornucopia of violin and cello works dating from the Baroque era to the present day.

Sol & Pat, though, was conceived and recorded before Plaisirs illuminés – in the area around Gstaad over the summers of 2017 and 2018. And, in fact, its real starting point is older still, as the players leap to point out when the three of us hook up over Zoom. ‘The thing to understand is that while everybody sees this album as a collaboration between two big artists, for us it began as good friends playing for pleasure at the very beginning of our musical lives,’ emphasises Gabetta. ‘We met in 2003 when we were both in Bern. I was playing with pianist Henri Sigfridsson, we were looking for a violinist to create a trio, and he told me, “You know there is an amazing violinist around here, and probably she’s a little bit crazy, but we could try.”’ Cue laughter from them both. ‘The first time we played together there was such an amazing connection,’ Gabetta continues, ‘and from there we carried on our musical lives together in many aspects. Patricia also created a festival near Bern where we played every winter. A lot of people performed who are now famous, but back then they were just friends, and we played almost everything, from duos to octets. Patricia and I played just about all the repertoire written for cello and violin, practising around 14 hours a day. It was crazy!’

PHOTOS JULIA WESELY

‘OUR PLAYING RESEMBLES SPEECH, LIKE SPOKEN DIALOGUE’

Kopatchinskaja has been laughing and nodding. ‘No fee, no money,’ she adds. ‘Everybody living in a strange old house at the top of the Alps. We had just one bathroom, so we all cleaned our teeth together. It was fantastic.’ Gabetta concludes (because the two are as much a seamless duo in interview as at their instruments): ‘So when you’ve played for 18 years together, the decision to record is natural – like playing with your sister.’

Equally natural was the decision to take the Ravel Sonata for violin and cello and Kodály’s Duo op.7 as their programme’s starting points. ‘There are no better works written for these two instruments,’ declares Kopatchinskaja. ‘You just have to include them. But then comes the question of how to frame them. We found a wonderful Xenakis piece, Dhipli zyia – not typical for him, but very folkloristic and a kind of echo of his roots. This, of course, goes very well with Kodály and with Ligeti, whose Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg we also chose. Xenakis even shared with them the horror of surviving a war in the middle of his life – he was a resistance fighter in the Second World War.’

Also featured on the album is 2.interlude by Lutosławski Quartet second violinist Marcin Markowicz – written for a composition competition that Kopatchinskaja and Gabetta held in the run-up to their concert at the 2018 Gstaad Menuhin Festival, with the aim of presenting five premieres and getting to know young composers. A noncompetition premiere from that concert is Coll’s Rizoma (2017) – actually the source for his double concerto Les plaisirs illuminés (2018). ‘I asked Francisco, “Do you want to imagine something for Sol and me?”’ says Kopatchinskaja, ‘and I think he was fascinated by our two personalities, because he really did write for us as two humans. Then came an unplanned miracle, because he finished it on the very day that Sol gave birth to her son Leo. So he dedicated it to Leo and called it Rizoma, which means “Roots”.’

Another choice full of personal resonance for them both is La fête au village by Swiss composer Julien-François Zbinden, who died in March this year aged 103. Written in 1947, but not recorded until now, this is a series of musical sketches depicting a provincial Swiss village’s national day of celebrations. ‘Sol and I recently became Swiss citizens,’ explains Kopatchinskaja, ‘so this, and in fact the whole CD, is a kind of gift to the country which has welcomed us since we studied here. One movement describes the mayor giving his speech. He’s a little bit drunk, pompous and empty, so we play it as a caricature, but also we emailed the composer to check this was right. He replied, “Yes, yes, yes, do it like this!”’

‘We play and then we talk’: Gabetta and Kopatchinskaja at the Reformed Church, Zweisimmen, in 2018

The Baroque choices (by Leclair, C.P.E. Bach and J.S. Bach), meanwhile, were selected as the pair prepared for that aforementioned new-music-heavy Gstaad Menuhin Festival duo concert. ‘We programmed the Baroque works to help the audience hear all the music with good ears, and perhaps even to hear modern music like old music,’ explains Gabetta. ‘For us, too, it was beautiful to place these works among the new compositions.’

As for the sessions themselves, in 2017 they recorded the Ravel and Kodály at Saanen Church near Gstaad but this was not straightforward. ‘It was a miracle we recorded anything, because we couldn’t play for ten minutes without an interruption!’ laughs Gabetta. ‘We weren’t allowed to write on the door to say we were recording and ask people to please not come in. So, the tourists came, they admired the church, they listened to music – and we just had to hope they wouldn’t make any noise. When finally they stopped coming in, a helicopter air display started outside instead!’ Kopatchinskaja then delivers the punchline: ‘And when they stopped, somebody started to cut the grass!’

The remainder of the programme was thus recorded in 2018 in the less touristy Reformed Church in Zweisimmen. However, a crucial piece of continuity was the presence of their sound engineer, Peter Laenger, with whom Gabetta first worked when she was 19, and with whom Kopatchinskaja has regularly worked since 2014. ‘He absolutely understands our way of recording,’ states Kopatchinskaja. ‘We play, and then we talk, and then we play again, and then we talk – and he knows that. He also knows what kind of sound we like – the exact distance of the microphone from the strings.’ Asked what that sound is, Gabetta responds, ‘I wouldn’t say we’re trying to sound “nice” or “not nice”. Simply that our playing resembles speech, like spoken dialogue.’

Still, good habits dictate that at the very start of any session they listen back. ‘It’s important to check how it sounds,’ says Kopatchinskaja. ‘Once, years ago, I was making a recording and I didn’t recognise my sound during playback. It was so perfect, so beautiful – and it was horrible. It was not me. So, the engineer pressed a button and turned off a special microphone he called the “honey microphone”, and suddenly I heard my voice, with its scratches and imperfections. I said, “Yes, that’s me. Do not correct my sound.”’

Back to Sol & Pat, and the album is accompanied by a tour of various Swiss venues, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and the Vienna Konzerthaus, among other locations. ‘Patricia wanted to play ten more dates,’ laughs Gabetta, ‘but I was scared because you have to be physically on top of this programme. It’s very different from playing with a pianist, where the majority of the heaviest work is probably in the piano part. Our duo concerts always feel like a marathon!’

WORKS by C.P.E. Bach, J.S. Bach, Coll, Kodály, Leclair, Ligeti, Markowicz, Ravel, Widmann, Xenakis, Zbinden ARTISTS Patricia Kopatchinskaja (vn) Sol Gabetta (vc) RECORDING VENUES Saanen Church, Switzerland (Kodály, Ravel); Reformed Church, Zweisimmen, Switzerland (all other works)