Anne Gastinel / Xavier Phillips OFFENBACH 6 Cello Duos

 

6 CELLO DUOS

Anne Gastinel / Nicholas Angelich / Gil Shaham / Andreas Ottensamer / Frankfurt Radio Symphony / Paavo Järvi BEETHOVEN Triple Concerto - Trio Op. 11

...the special feature of this work is its highly individual form: it’s a concertante work, but it’s also genuine chamber music. This mixture of genres, this duality, isn’t always easy to handle: Gil, Nicholas and I form a trio, but one in which each member takes on a solo part. There’s a real balance to be found, which is harder than when there are only two soloists – as in the Brahms Double Concerto, for example. All through the work, there’s continual inter- action between the soloists, and between the trio and the orchestra. 

This concerto can easily become just a superposition of talents if the three soloists are not as ‘connected’ as they are in chamber music. I’ve often thought that the ideal solution was to ask an existing trio to perform it. The challenge of this recording was to form a trio that could play a concertante work with an orchestra, and to create a group that would function naturally and intuitively. I strongly felt that was what was needed. That’s why I immediately thought of Nicholas and Gil. Nicholas, whom I’ve known for a very long time now, has the rare quality of being both a great soloist and a great chamber musician. He always listens to his partners, and his playing is magni cent. As to Gil, whom I admire and whose playing I really love, he’s someone who is characterised by perpetual exchange and mobility; he too is a great listener, so generous and open to other people’s ideas that it’s sheer delight to play with him. We didn’t know each other, except from hearing recordings or concerts, but things came together quite naturally. The three of us met in Paris to play through the work before meeting the orchestra, about a month and a half before the concerts. That rehearsal is still a wonderful memory: everything was so natural, so self-evident between us! We all felt the same thing, that very spontaneous reaction when you make music together, you phrase together . . . That’s the magic of rst meetings, sometimes. 

The orchestra is also very present in this piece; its part is very important. It doesn’t just ac- company the soloists. We’re dealing here with a real Beethoven symphony, featuring a trio of soloists that reacts to the orchestra in a permanent give-and-take... (Anne Gastinel)

Anne Gastinel / Pablo Márquez IBÉRICA

This engaging new release leaves no doubt that the sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy song of the cello can pull off a Spanish accent just as well as that of the classical guitar. With “Ibérica”, French cellist Anne Gastinel and Argentinean guitarist Pablo Márquez (whose recording of the vihuela music of Luys de Narváez so impressed recently – ECM, 10/07) bring an urbane and sophisticated yet earthy and sensual quality to the songs and dances of Falla and Granados, as well as the solo guitar and solo cello music of the great Spanish cellist and friend of Andrés Segovia, Gaspar Cassadó. The opening Danza española No 1 from Falla’s La vida breve is a revelation, Gastinel’s spiccato-studded bowing showering fiery notes over Márquez’s crisply articulated accompaniment; the Intermezzo from Granados’s opera Goyescas and the same composer’s tonadilla La maja dolorosa meanwhile highlights the intense beauty of Gastinel’scantabile playing.

In another tonadilla, the well known La maja de Goya, Márquez displays the finely nuanced singing quality of his own playing; he is equally convincing in three works for solo guitar by Cassadó (here recorded for the first time), especially in the moving Canción de Leonardo, a homage to Segovia’s young son who was killed in an accident in 1951.

Gastinel also makes a solo contribution with Cassadó’s famous Suite for solo cello, fully availing herself of the expressive possibilities of this superb, multifaceted work. But this disc ultimately belongs to the chemistry that seems to exist between these two remarkable musicians. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)

Anne Gastinel AMERICAS

Born in 1971 Anne Gastinel began playing the cello at the age of four while studying simultaneously the piano and the oboe. She gave her television début at the age of 10 as concert soloist. Five years later Anne Gastinel finished first place at the Music Conservatory in Lyon went on to complete her brilliant studies at the National Music Conservatory in Paris. In 1989, she met Yo Yo Ma, Janos Starker and Paul Tortelier who later became her masters and profoundly marked her personal musical evolution. By the age of 18, Anne Gastinel had performed in over fifty cities throughout Europe, won the 1st prize of the International Competition of Scheveningen and became the first French artist in forty years to reach the finals of the International Competition of Prague. Revealed to the vast public by the 1990 televised Eurovision Tournament in Vienna and shortly thereafter at the Rostropovich Competition in Paris, Anne Gastinel pursued an impressive solo career which took her on annual worldwide tours around Europe, Africa, Asia and America performing in prestigious halls among which the Salle Pleyel, Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Théâtre Châtelet, Schauspielhaus, Musikverein, Santori Hall, Victoria Hall. For the past 12 years she has equally been performing with internationally renown orchestras and distinguished artists such as Kurt Sanderling, Emmanuel Krivine, Louis Langrée, Semyon Bychkov, Vladimir Spivakov, Pinchas Steinberg, Yuri Bashmet, Max Rabinovitsj, Lord Yehudi Menuhin… Her recording career both in chamber and orchestral music won acclaimed success from the international press and resulted in great distinctions such as the Victoires “Young Talent 1994”, Victoires “Best Recording of the year” 1995, “Discothèque idéale”, Prix “Fnac” in 1995 and 2000 the Prix de l’Académie du disque et Classique d’Or by French Radio RTL in 1996 and 1998 – the “Choc” du Monde de la Musique, Télérama¦¦¦¦ 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002. Designated unanimously in 1997 as ambassador of French cello, Anne Gastinel was nominated in New York by Marta Casals-Istomin to receive the mythical Matteo Gofriller cello belonging to Pablo Casals. Presently Miss Gastinel performs on a Testore made in 1690 (association “Fonds Instrumental Français”). She has received several distinctions among which the “Femme en Or 2002” for the Perfoming Arts. Anne Gastinel has also held the honory position of Patron for the “Festival des Rencontres de Musique de Chambre de Lyon” since 2000. Anne Gastinel continues to charm her audience wherever she performs - striving to privilege the art of sharing – the very essence of music to her eyes.

Anne Gastinel / Yuri Bashmet JOSEPH HAYDN Concertos pour Violoncelle 1 & 2

With the CD catalogue now awash with recordings of these concertos featuring every conceivable interpretative standpoint, any new version has to make a pretty strong case for its existence. Anne Gastinel is a technically adroit soloist, with an attractive, resinous tone, and certainly gives pleasure in her eloquently shaped accounts of the slow movements. Elsewhere, though, her playing can be a shade routine and undifferentiated, short on spontaneity and rhythmic imagination: listen to both the rival versions in, say, the finale of the C major work, and you’ll hear a wit, fantasy and lightness of touch that elude the efficient but slightly stolid Gastinel. And both Steven Isserlis and, especially, Truls Mork, find altogether more grace and allure in the outer movements of the D major Concerto, where Gastinel sounds dutiful rather than delighted in the bravura passagework. In fairness, she is done few favours by the prosaic, overemphatic orchestral accompaniments or by an ultra-close recorded balance which picks up every tiny sniff and hiss. And it is miserly of Auvidis to offer just 49 minutes of music at full price.' (Richard Wigmore/Gramophone)

Anne Gastinel / Claire Désert FRANCK - DEBUSSY - POULENC

This is an excellent version of Poulenc’s Cello Sonata. It has a persuasive sense of direction and a well-judged series of tempo decisions. It’s also warmly played, and ensemble between Anne Gastinel and Claire Désert is watertight. If your classic recording of choice is that of Pierre Fournier with Jacques Février—and I suppose that 1971 LP disc looms large in the discography—then you should know that the newcomers have their own views about things, and they ensure a convincing milieu for the work. Maybe the older pair breathed more naturally at certain points in the first movement—one feels their paragraphal phrasing is the more natural—but that doesn’t limit admiration for Gastinel and Désert, who take a more incisive tempo for the slow movement and sustain it well. It’s a passionate point of view, but then it is a passionate movement and one of the most outspoken in all of Poulenc’s music. Witty badinage restores things in the Ballabile third movement, and while Fournier emphasizes some of the more spectral moments in the finale with greater impact and immediacy, the more up-to-date and natural dynamic range of this Naïve recording proves laudable. This then is a compelling and first-class account of the sonata.
The Debussy sonata reprises the virtues of the Poulenc, though it does so in a way that signals the players’ freedom from convention. They don’t play in as arresting a manner as those pioneering French musicians Maurice Maréchal and Robert Casadesus, who, in their 1930 recording, performed with unselfconscious directness. But they do abjure some of the more outré gestures that have accreted to, say, the Sérénade’s pizzicatos, which is well and good in my book. They play with assurance throughout, though my own preferences lie with the classic older statement and also with the more phrasally suggestive playing of Tortelier and Gerald Moore in their 1948 disc, now in a huge Paul Tortelier EMI retrospective box.
The last work is the transcription of the Franck Violin Sonata made by Jules Delsart, with the approval of the composer, in 1888. This has been an increasingly popular option for cellists, and Gastinel and Désert play with a canny appreciation of when to press on and when to fine-down tone. Gastinel’s vibrato speed is well judged, and the pianist, who shoulders most of the truly taxing demands, acquits herself estimably.
This fine recital has been warmly recorded, is well balanced and reflects well on all concerned. (Jonathan Woolf)

Anne Gastinel / Claire Désert SCHUBERT Arpeggione

Cellists love Schubert for the wonderful things he gives them in the String Quintet, but he wrote nothing for solo cello. Anne Gastinel gives a charming apologia for this programme of transcriptions, in the form of a letter to Schubert, but the best justification lies in the appropriateness of the material and the standard of performance. The Arpeggione Sonata, indeed, sounds better on the cello than on any other conventional instrument, and the fact that some passages lie uncomfortably high is no problem for someone with Gastinel's technique. This is a suave performance; there's a wide range of expression and the more lively sections are played brilliantly, with plenty of spirit. At the other end of the scale, Gastinel and Desert create a beautiful atmosphere, sad yet tranquil, in those places (the end of the first movement, the latter stages of the Adagio) where Schubert allows the energy of his musical discourse to drain away.
The little D major Violin Sonata transcribes well, apart from a few places where a low cello accompaniment muddies the harmonic waters. The outer movements aren't taken too fast, so that the cantabile themes have space to breathe. But I wish Gastinel had played certain slurred passages, like the counterpoint in the Andante's final section, more smoothly.
The song transcriptions are well chosen and faithful (the original keys are retained), and Gastinel compensates for the absence of words with inspired changes of tone colour. For example, the heartbroken Miller's lament has a stark sound, without vibrato, to contrast with the softer tone of the consoling brook. Claire Desert reveals herself as a most accomplished, lively accompanist. (Duncan Druce, Gramophone 12/2005)

Anne Gastinel BACH Cello Suites

Anne Gastinel is one of France's most frequently recorded and highly regarded cellists. Having performed the bulk of the instrument's standard repertoire, she has made a name for herself through her powerful, clean, technically proficient, and musically fulfilling recordings. Her foray into the Bach cello suites, by and large, is similarly pleasing. Although she was once allowed to play on Casals' legendary Goffriller cello, for this album she must "settle" for a magnificently deep and projecting 1690 Testore instrument. Gastinel tends to favor swift tempos throughout the Six Suites, never quite stepping over the line of being too fast or rushed, but definitely pushing the envelope. Her technical prowess cannot be faulted as she executes even the most nimble of passages with apparent ease and cleanliness. Intonation is solid, tone color is delightfully varied, and Naïve's recorded sound quality is present but still warm and inviting. The only area some listeners may find questionable is rhythm, which Gastinel almost continuously morphs. Sometimes, like in most of the dance movements, the rhythmic alterations are more slight, elongating notes here and there to outline form. However, these are dances, and listeners may find their lack of rhythmic integrity off-putting. Some of the preludes, however, are greatly altered rhythmically. The Prelude from the C major Suite, for example, is so altered that someone taking rhythmic dictation from Gastinel's playing would never in a million years come up with what is actually printed in the score. Listeners who appreciate this kind of fluidity will no doubt find her playing quite enjoyable; those who prefer a bit more formality may not be as satisfied. (Mike D. Brownell)