City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Gautier Capuçon is regarded as a 21^st-century ambassador of the cello, but he himself uses the title “L’Ambassadeur” to refer to his instrument, made in 1701 in the workshop of the Venetian master Matteo Goffriller. He has been playing that cello for more than 20 years: “It’s a phenomenal instrument. I have a feeling that it is a cello without limits. I am inspired every day to find new tones, new sounds. It’s endless. It’s a great companion”, he told Strings Magazine in 2018.

The cello is ideal in combination with Capuçon’s infectious musicianship and virtuosity, as is shown by his frequent guest appearances with the world’s top orchestras. Gauiter Capuçon appears with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Czech Philharmonic. He has been collaborating for 15 years with the chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Semyon Bychkov. With the conductor Jakub Hrůša and the Orchestre de Paris, he appeared in the autumn of 2020 at the Grande salle Pierre Boulez in Paris, where they performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto together.

The artist also plays chamber music regularly with stars from around the world including the pianists Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang. He also appears frequently with his equally famous brother, the violinist Renaud Capuçon.

He is well known to audiences at the BBC Proms and the festival in Lugano, Switzerland.

Among his special performances have been participation at celebrations of the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he played parts of Bloch’s composition From Jewish Life, and with his brother he appeared at a concert at the Eiffel Tower on the occasion of celebrations of Bastille Day, where he played before more than 35,000 listeners. At the same venue in 2019 the cellist played an arrangement of Dvořák’s Song to the Moon from the opera Rusalka; that concert was seen on television by more than 3 million viewers.

Besides giving concerts, Capuçon is also an active teacher. Since 2014 he has been the head of the Classe d’Excellence de Violoncelle of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Each year, he chooses six talented young cellists to whom he devotes attention during lessons on interpretation, joint music making, and seminars with discussion.

Music critics have no doubt about this artist’s qualities either: “…Gautier Capuçon plays the cello with the control and wisdom of a much older musician. The lightness of his touch and the consistent clarity of his bow strokes are quite admirable in themselves, but when combined with an uncanny sweetness of tone in the higher registers they are breathtaking,” wrote the magazine Gramophone. In February 2018 the British website Arts Desk said about his performance: “That Capuçon is among the greatest of cellists was announced by the passionate projection of his amazing sound from the start. Capuçon is an exceptional chamber musician too, so it was hardly surprising to find him fine-tuned to his orchestral colleagues.”

Gautier Capuçon comes from Chambéry in the Savoy Alps, from a family of lovers of music and skiing. In his case, the choice of the cello was a lucky coincidence: his sister Aude played the piano, his brother Renaud the violin, and Gautier, barely five years old, got the cello. “I’ve always known that it is my main instrument. From the moment when I began to play, it nearly became a part of my body”, he said when recalling his beginnings in an interview for the Czech news server Novinky in 2015. We should add that together with his brother Renaud he has made nearly thirty recordings, and for the album Inventions (2006) he also invited his sister Aude, who continues to play the piano as a hobby.

After completing his study of cello playing in his home town Chambéry, Capuçon continued his studies at the Conservatoire Supérieur in Paris in the studio of Philippe Muller, an important representative of the French school of cello playing, then in Vienna he studied under the equally renowned cellist Heinrich Schiff. Both of his teachers had studied under the legendary French cellist André Navarra. Success at competitions soon followed—first prize at the Maurice Ravel International Music Academy (1998), victory at the André Navarra International Cello Competition (1999), the title of Talent of the Year 2001 at the annual French classical music event Victoires de la musique classique, and three years later the Burletti-Buitoni Trust Award.

Capuçon records exclusively for the Erato label (Warner Classics), and four of his recordings have earned him the prestigious ECHO Klassik award. In his discography we find, among other things, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony (hr-Sinfonieorchester) and Paavo Järvi, and Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations and Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre and Valery Gergiev. He has recorded Brahms’s Double Concerto with his brother Renaud, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, and the conductor Myung-Whun Chung, and Haydn’s concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Harding. He also took part in the album Martha Argerich & Friends, Live From Lugano 2015. With the pianist Yuja Wang he made a CD recording of the Debussy and Franck cello sonatas, which will also be heard on a Prague Spring concert.

He enjoys involvement in non-traditional projects; in 2018 to make a video clip for the album Intuition he went up to the summit of the mountain Petit Combin in the Swiss Alps at an elevation of 3,356 metres, where he played Saint-Säens’s famous Swan from the suite The Carnival of the Animals at a temperature of 15 degrees below zero.

With his last album Souvenirs, issued in the autumn of 2021, the artist looks back a bit to the repertoire that accompanied the beginnings of his career, celebrating both 20 years of partnership with the recording company and his 40^th birthday.

Now it is Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla who follows in their footsteps, and the principal guest conductor is Kazuki Yamada. Other members of the conducting staff are Michael Seal, assistant conductor Jaume Santonja Espinós, and choirmaster Simon Halsey. Under the leadership of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the orchestra is not backing down from the visionary path taken by her predecessors. We should recall that Rattle began the 20^th-century music concert series Towards the Millennium, a series of television programmes about the music of the 20^th century titled Leaving Home, and supported the programming new of works, the emphasis on English repertoire, and performances of the complete Sibelius symphonies with the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo or of Shostakovich’s music with Andris Nelsons.

All of the conductors got on board with the CBSO quite early. In fact, the orchestra is known for that: Simon Rattle got his start with them at 24 years of age as the youngest chief conductor in the United Kingdom, Sakari Oramo was approached by orchestra management after two concerts, and Nelsons after just three rehearsals. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla got her offer from the orchestra six months after her first appearance because the musicians felt that there was the right kind of energy between them. The public also reacted to her concert enthusiastically.

The organisation operates more than just the symphony orchestra. The “CBSO family” includes 650 musicians, and besides the symphony orchestra, there is a choir of nearly 200 “professional amateurs”, a choir for children and youth, and a youth orchestra with more than 100 members. During the year, youth orchestra members take part in an orchestral academy and conducting and composition workshops, and for some of them, these studies are an important step towards a professional career.

Educational programmes are an integral part of the orchestra’s profile, covering all age categories from the youngest children to seniors. This involves more than just educational concerts; the musicians also regularly visit schools, children with special needs are not overlooked, and some musicians are trained to work with seniors suffering from dementia. The orchestra also works in cooperation with the University of Birmingham and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and it offers stipends for composition students at the University of Cambridge so they can hear their works live.

Since 1991, the CBSO has been performing at Symphony Hall, which city representatives built on the basis of the orchestra’s extraordinary successes with its former chief conductor Simon Rattle. With a capacity for more than 2,200 listeners and superb acoustics, it is regarded as one of the best concert halls in the world. Each year, the orchestra gives more than 150 performances with repertoire ranging from Classical and Romantic works to contemporary music. They do not shy away from film music, either.

A regular highpoint of the orchestra’s season is an appearance at the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall. In past years, the orchestra has gone on successful tours of Europe, Japan, China, and the United Arab Emirates.

The orchestra has a busy recording schedule. One of its greatest successes in that field has been the complete Saint-Saëns piano concertos with Stephen Hough; in 2008 Gramophone magazine called it the best recording of classical music of the last 30 years.

Every lover of Bruckner’s music also knows that the Sixth Symphony has one of the most beautiful slow movements the composer ever wrote, a masterful formal conception, and a joyous atmosphere.

The composer proudly called his Sixth Symphony his most daring (“Die Sechste ist die Keckste”). He wrote it in Vienna from 1879 to 1881 and employed his typical procedures like internal connections between the outer movements and the extensive use of rhythmic figures, and especially the “Bruckner rhythm” (a sequence of five notes in a particular ordering), daring harmonies, and writing influenced by his experience as an organist. The work’s brevity and quicker tempos differentiate it from his other great symphonies, while in the second movement he employed sonata form instead of the usual ternary structure. Also unusual is the beginning of the symphony with a rhythmic figure instead of Bruckner’s usual string tremolo. The common denominator for all four movements is contrast between light and darkness and between the major and minor modes. Notice the simple, almost inconspicuous recapitulation of the first movement and the breathtaking mood of the second movement, which seems to be a distant relative of Mahler’s music. The English composer Robert Simpson called the sonata structure of the movement “the most perfectly realized slow sonata design since the Adagio of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata.”

And if we are not helped by these guideposts, we can simply follow the advice of the British musicologist Donald Tovey: “…if one clears their mind, not only of prejudice but of wrong points of view, and treats Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony as a kind of music we have never heard before, there is no doubt that its high quality will strike us at every moment. “

During his lifetime, Bruckner only heard a live performance of the symphony’s two middle movements, which the Vienna Philharmonic played in February 1883 with little success. The whole work was first heard in 1899 in Vienna with the conductor Gustav Mahler, although he made major changes to the score. The public did not hear the symphony in its complete and original form until 1901 in Stuttgart under the baton of Karl Pohlig. Later, the work became a part of the repertoire of orchestras and conductors around the world, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with Eugen Jochum, Bernard Hatink, Herbert Blomstedt with the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and last but not least, the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan.