Notes from the 2026 Salzburg Festival ( 3 ) Sol Gabetta & Kristian Bezuidenhout

Salzburg Festival • Soloists Concert • Sol Gabetta & Kristian Bezuidenhout

Also published in Die Presse: Salzburg: Sol Gabetta kredenzt hübsche Violoncello-Zuckerl

Brahms / Mendelssohn Cello Sonatas ♥ Starker/Sebők ♥ Mercury, 1996 US | UK | DE

Gabetta and Bezuidenhout: Well-behaved German Romanticism

Pretty Cello Bonbons and a Trio for Piano, Cello and Hearing Aid

Tuesday at the Mozarteum she was still part of Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s quintet, on Wednesday she was back as the headliner: Sol Gabetta – with fortepianist extraordinaire Kristian Bezuidenhout, in the Haus für Mozart. Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, sonatas by Brahms (No. 1) and Mendelssohn (No. 2), garnished with arrangements for cello and piano of various smaller melodic confections. The two concerts could scarcely have been more different. Gabetta fits in beautifully when Kopatchinskaja sets the agenda – wild, unruly, tussled. When the Argentine star is in charge herself, different principles apply. Here she plays with lyrical assurance, always nice-sounding, dutifully beautiful to the point of cooing. In the golden depths of her cello, she is tonally at home; as the register rises, the tone seems to lose color. Somehow Bezuidenhout went along with all of this and appeared to recede into the background.

This exquisite music-making – take Gabetta’s honeyed sweetness in the slow Allegro non troppo of the Brahms Sonata, and Bezuidenhout's sparkling-delicate accompaniment – is all a pleasure and music-making at the highest level. Objectively there is nothing to fault in the trim attack with which Gabetta draws her notes from the cello. Nor in her intonation or phrasing. And yet… Perhaps it was the vast acoustic of the Haus für Mozart itself, which resists the intimacy her playing needs – swallowing any and all of the energy that didn’t come directly from the chosen tempos. Fast tempos, however, had to wait until the concluding Mendelssohn Sonata. For everything before it – entirely in keeping with Johannes “ma non troppo” Brahms’s own prescription – was awfully tasteful and measured.

And yes: as if something had been building up, the Mendelssohn was, if not exactly exuberant, at least somewhat uberant. The applause after the first movement felt natural, necessary, and was considerably more welcome than awkward embarrassed coughing would have been. Then, at the close, a rogue hearing aid joined the ensemble persistently – at times louder than the cello. Gabetta was not notably displeased. Friction arrived at last. She threw herself into the notes with good deal of bite and fury: The best three minutes of the evening.

Sol Gabetta (Cello), Kristian Bezuidenhout (Piano) © SF/Marco Borrelli

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Notes from the 2026 Salzburg Festival ( 2 ) Kopatchinskaja, Friends, and György Kurtág

Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Hommage à Kurtág

Also published in Die Presse: Kopatchinskaja in Salzburg: Schnurren und Kratzen für Kurtág & Co.

Kurtág / Schumann Hommage à R. Sch et al Kashkashian, Levin, Brunner ECM, 2006 US | UK | DE

György Kurtág Játékok (selection) Gábor Csalog, M.& G. Kurtág BMC Records, 2006 US | UK | DE

Playing with Music

Music as lived joy: Kopatchinskaja brings Kurtág to Salzburg — and it's simply great entertainment

Patricia Kopatchinskaja was made for playing the music of György Kurtág — or vice versa. However that may be, in her chamber music homage to the hundred-year-old composer at the Salzburg Festival, she demonstrated how much is already won — not only in contemporary music — when a violinist refuses to insist on playing just beautifully, and instead interprets with the whole body, from the curls down to the tips of her toes.

Fiddling, stomping, plucking, she worked her way through Kurtág's profound scrawlings from „Zeichen, Spiele und Botschaften" and the „Játékok" collections with her musical partners. Pianist Olga Pashchenko had already impressed in the opening second Bartók Rhapsody for violin and piano — both in the restraint of her part, palying along as if parallel to the violin, and in the suddenness with which she lunged forward, like a hungry moray-eel, whenever Bartók thrusts the piano into the spotlight. In the Kurtág she drew out the abstract tenderness of „Hommage à Márta," just as Kopatchinskaja shaped „…féerie d'automne…" as a pianissimo exhalation — light as on butterfly-wings. Elsewhere Kopatchinskaja plunged into her instrument — alone or alongside Pashchenko, violinist Jonia Ilias Kadesha, the lusciously toned Lawrence Power on viola, and/or Sol Gabetta on cello — like a tomcat in a mating fight, driving it through Kurtág's fragile, skewed, compressed music. What strikes one above all is how unpretentiously modern Kurtág writes. What would sound simply absurd from other, self-important composers is here disarming.

Bartók's „Bagpipe" Duo from the „44 Duos" for two violins was staged as a small, spontaneous theatrical piece for all six musicians, with the musicians eventually exiting until only Reto Bieri (clarinet), Kopatchinskaja and Pashchenko remained for the wild „Contrasts" for violin, clarinet and piano — also Bartók — which, living up to its name, was carried forward wild and unleashed, then whispering and murmured.

Mozart's Clarinet Quintet K. 581 waited as a reward in the second half — though the audience was already so enthused by the Kurtág and Bartók that no lure would have been needed. Then again, one simply doesn't say no to a slow movement that sublime — and so they listened to the fiveseome, gathered around Bieri and his modern basset clarinet, in these four movements of pure pleasure: Sensitive, soft and supple, genuine ego-free chamber music atmosphere par excellance. Where Bieri had — deliberately — hissed and spat air in the excitable Bartók, here he was milk and honey manifest in the form of a clarinet, bewitchingly quiet and breathless in the slow movement. But „contrasts" was the watchword here too — the Quintet went off in the Menuetto as if stung by hornet: Kopatchinskaja does not let such opportunities pass to go for broke instead of playing nice. (That's rather Gabetta's game, although she went along with the general gist quite nicely here.) The Variations finale was handled with generous latitude — entirely in keeping with so playful an ensemble.

Jonian Ilias Kadesha, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Olga Pashchenko, Lawrence Power, Sol Gabetta. SF / Marco Borrelli

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Critic’s Notebook: Pavel Haas Quartet Makes the Ears Dance in an All-Czech Program

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Tiefenbeglückender Ohrentanz, gänzlich tschechisch: Bekanntes Ungehörtes, unerhört Beliebtes: Das Pavel Haas Quartet im Musikverein, mit einem Abend zum Schwärmen

Bohuslav Martinů String Quartets 2, 3, 5, 7 Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 2025) US | UK | DE

Bedrich Smetana The String Quartets Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 2015) US | UK | DE

Raving in Czech

The Known-unheard and outrageously popular: the Pavel Haas Quartet and an evening of chamber music to make your ears swoon

What a program — on paper alone. Who? One of the most celebrated string quartets of our time, Prague's Pavel Haas Quartet. Where? The Muskverein's Brahms-Saal. What? An entirely Czech program, running from the sole string quartet of the short-lived Vítězslava Kaprálová (1935) through Bohuslav Martinů's Fifth Quartet (1938) to that most reliable of pleasures, Antonín Dvořák's Fourteenth and last quartet, in A-flat major, op. 105 (1895). Kaprálová's music, barely two dozen works in total, has been rediscovered in spasmodically over the decades, tenaciously if intermittently — but one does not actually get to hear it very often. (Or else it's hidden in well-meaning but generally dismal "look: Women composers!" programs that are such an ironic, unintended bane to composers that happen to have been women.) This is a substantial three-movement quartet of some twenty minutes, written by a twenty-year-old nearing the end of her studies in Brno: rhythmic, mobile, tonal, but facing boldly forward — unsurprisingly in the musical orbit of Schulhoff, Pavel Haas, and Martinů. Certain works carry a luminous seriousness and quality that shimmers through them; Kaprálová's op.8 is one of those.

The Fifth Quartet of Martinů was not chosen as a companion piece, merely because it's a sensationally effective work at the intersection of Bartók, Shostakovich, and Janáček, and (like all of Martinů's quartets, which the Pavel Haas Quartet is currently recording for Supraphon) deserves to be far better known. Kaprálová is also the direct inspiration for the piece: she was Martinů's student in Paris for three years — and thereafter, in all likelihood, his lover. Think of it as Martinů's equivalent of Janáček's "Intimate Letters" — quartet. The work rocks from the opening bar with an irresistibility that seems to want to carry the momentum of Kaprálová's dynamic finale straight into itself. The relentless climaxes of the partially spooky Adagio, each time the Pavel Haas Quartet allowed them to relax, offered a delicious shiver of complex lyricism. As fragile as the movement dissolves, so wild does the Allegro vivo return — with maximum, ferocious forward thrust. Feet and heads bobbed in the audience, pretty much universally. The viola-throaty tone of the first violin in the finale's Lento feigned relaxation before the irresistible surge of the Allegro that followed.

Throughout all, one didn't actually pay all that much attention to the quartet's playing as such — because it seems to function by itself, entirely naturally: what one hears is not interpretation but music. Here, as in the Dvořák — whose fugal opening gradually yields to the composer's characteristic melodic abundance — it was the tonal richness of the ensemble that was so arresting. This isn't some pretty-playing style they indulge in, but a style that adapts, like an octopus, to its musical environment as needed: pallid, wild, sweet, spiky — irresistible. One could look elsewhere for finer individualists: the second violin in the Quatuor Ébène, the viola in the Belcea Quartet, the Cuarteto Casals' cello. But anyone who can make your ears dance the way this quartet did in the Dvořák is offering something singular — and seems to make this argument: one good string quartet evening is worth ten orchestral concerts, so sustainably and deeply satisfying are these hours.

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Notes from the 2025 Salzburg Festival ( 5 ) Cuarteto Casals in Shostakovich

Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Cuarteto Casals

Also published in Die Presse: Serenade zum Todestag von Schostakowitsch: Cuarteto Casals in Salzburg

D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.1), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.2), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.3), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi

Death Becomes them: Shostakovich Quartets in Salzburg

The Cuarteto Casals scored with dark sonority rather than hard edges in their DSCH-dedicated chamber music recital

Monday evening at the Salzburg Festival brought another birthday serenade for Shostakovich’s 50^th death anniversary at the Mozarteum Hall – from the Cuarteto Casals. They promised three string quartets. Only three? After all, the Mandelring Quartet (CD reviews here, here, and here) still played all 15 quartets at the Festival back in 2011! (Reviewed on ionarts here.) But one doesn't want to be immoderate, and with Quartets 1, 8, and 15 – i.e. the first, last, and most famous – the selection was promising enough.

All the more so since there are no “early” string quartets with DSCH: When the 32-year-old Shostakovich took his first crack at the genre, with op.49, he was already an experienced composer with one suppressed and four performed symphonies plus two operas under his belt. The Lady Macbeth scandal that had brought him to the edge of the Gulag, and the ‘resurrection’ thanks to the Fifth Symphony, lay behind him. It should not surprise, then, that this first quartet is immediately a masterwork – as if it had sprung, Pallas-Athena-like, from Zeus’s head.

Right away, the Cuarteto Casals’ gloriously solid, perpetually beautiful, expressive sound – from top to bottom, first violin to cello – makes quite an impression. Cellist Arnau Tomàs (check out his Bach!!!) handled his part with resonant, bearish authority. Wonderful, the woody, round-cheeked timbre of Cristina Cordero’s viola. Fascinating the mediating work of second violinist Abel Tomàs. And fitting excellently into the picture: the dark-timbred first violin of Vera Martínez Mehner. One doesn’t miss the rougher approach that has a long tradition in these works at all, because the Spanish quartet’s lyricism, while luxurious, never seems superficial. Nor did it ever feel like the quartet was rounding the edges too much – a criticism that might be (though it doesn’t have to be) made of the Mandelrings. Small and infrequent intonation wobbles couldn’t distract amidst the astonishment over the sound.

That the Eighth Quartet is so much better known than the others does, in a way, surprise, since they all seem equally good. Or more evenly superb than the symphonies, anyway. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to make the difference between hit and rarity, icon and footnote. (Are, for example, Mozart’s symphonies really as much better than those of Vanhal and Mysliveček as the fame gradient would have us believe?) But perhaps it’s also the dark vein of op.110 – so fitting the clichéd image of DSCH – that fascinates us, seeing that it appears to reflect the composer’s suffering and disguised resistance in Soviet terror…

And it was melancholy-gripping, what the Cuarteto Casals – currently recording all the quartets for Harmonia Mundi (see the Shostakovich String Quartet Survey) – delivered. “If his 15 symphonies are, according to the composer, ‘gravestones’”, writes Robert Reilly in Surprised by Beauty, “then the quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves.” The Cuarteto Casals’ tone – sadly beautiful and mellow – suits this poetry of suffering well.

One could title the six slow, relentless, embittered movements of op.144 with: “The Six Last Words of the Survivor”. Even more so than with Haydn, this deceleration on Shostakovich’s part is a gutsy, deliberate, and pointed imposition on the listener. The interpreters’ long lines made concentration easy, though, thanks to the unremitting inner tension amid this sustained slowness, and the pinch of Haydnesque mischief. The encore from the Third String Quartet, meanwhile, was merciless and had a symphonic earthiness about it. Fabulous, all, and very promising as far as their recordings are concerned.

Vera Martínez Mehner (Violine), Abel Tomàs (Violine), Arnau Tomàs (Violoncello), Cristina Cordero (Viola). SF / Marco Borrelli

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Critic’s Notebook: Superstar Trio on Chamber-Music Tour

Lisa Batiashvili,© Chris Singer

Also published in Die Presse: Kammermusik: Diese Kombo hat es in sich

Antonín Dvořákr Complete Piano Trios Panenka/Suk/Chuchro Supraphon US | UK | DE

Antonín Dvořákr Complete Piano Trios Beaux Arts Trio Philips/Decca US | UK | DE

Antonín Dvořákr Piano Trios Op.65 & 90 Tetzlaff2/Vogt Ondine US | UK | DE

Lisa Batiashvili, Gautier Capuçon, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet make a better-than expected Trio

It doesn’t always work: superstars doing chamber music in the grand halls of classical music. This combo, though, had something going for itself.

Chamber music in large halls is, on the one hand, a wonderful thing — a sign that this genre, hard to sell but the beating heart of classical music, can still draw a crowd. On the other hand, such music is usually less at home in places like the Great Hall of the Konzerthaus than, in it would be in its smaller, perfectly suited Mozart Hall, for example. But when soloists with the star power of Lisa Batiashvili, Gautier Capuçon and Jean-Yves Thibaudet appear together, compromises must be made.

That this one turned out not to be much of a compromise at all was remarkable — and owed to the trio’s balanced playing. No one held back, no one dominated, there were no hiearchic shenanigans, and no one got lost in precious detail. Whether in the youthful works of the first half — Debussy and Shostakovich’s early trios — or in the second, devoted entirely to Dvořák’s mature F-minor Trio Op. 65 (who was, after all, a venerable 42 when he wrote it).

The Dvořák, cleanly and spiritedly played, served as another reminder that his chamber music never really disappoints — at least not when, as here (no small feat for a team of soloists), the playing is genuinely ensemble-minded: relaxed in the Poco adagio, varied in the finale, and fleet in the Mendelssohn-like scherzo of the encore, which was played entirely in keeping with Dvořák’s spirit.

Even more intriguing were the first two pieces, however, where Batiashvili and Capuçon could truly shine: she full-bodied and rhytmically steady-as-a-rock, he slightly sentimental, bittersweet, elegant — both superbly attuned to each other. That Thibaudet sometimes drifted toward the role of accompanist rather than full creative collaborator, or that his clarity occasionally suffered from the brisk tempos, mattered little at this level of overall excellence.


Follow @ClassicalCritic