On 4^th March, the music-loving public in Zürich can listen to a recital of Sol Gabetta, this great Argentine cellist living in Switzerland, who made her spectacular debut in 2004, alongside the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Valeri Gergiev. Ever since, she has admirably shaped her artistic profile. Sol Gabetta not only has an extremely busy concert schedule, but also a tight collaboration with the big record labels. You can find her among the Sony artists, with a beautifully individualized catalogue - three ‛The Vivaldi Project' albums, a Haydn - Hofmann - Mozart album produced together with the Basel Chamber Orchestra, a Shostakovich album, on which you can also find the name of Mihaela Ursuleasa, a duo with the pianist Helene Grimaux, the Elgar Concert for which she received the third ECHO Klassik award and many others. We are now referring to a very recent release - ‛The Chopin Album', a new cello-piano dialogue signed by Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou. The two have been playing together for many years and it is only now that they also appear as partners on the cover of this album, released under the Sony label on 13^th February.

During an interview, the cellist stated: ‛Most musicians rush to the recording studios without having that indispensable experience of the stage, the real experience. We usually record too soon. There are artists who are just twenty years old and have already released the great works on record - this applies to everyone except pianists, their repertoire being huge'. Instead, this album is the result of eight or nine years of experience, during which the two appeared in dozens of recitals. Besides, as Sol Gabetta states, ‛if it had not been for Bertrand Chamayou and his experience, I would have never recorded a Chopin album'.

'The Chopin Album' opens with the Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor. What we can say is that the two artists have found enough territory to propose a personal interpretation. Although this is maybe Chopin's most well-known piece in which the soloist is another instrument, and not the piano, the sonata does not suffer the same fate as the opuses having dozens of often very different versions, which leave no room for innovation. Besides this sonata, Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou also propose other smaller pieces, some of them less known - the Grand Duo concertant in E major on themes from Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable, composed in 1832 by Chopin, together with his close friend Auguste-Joseph Franchomme, a famous cellist of the time. We also discover one of the Études Op. 25 and two Nocturnes, all of them completing this Chopinian atmosphere in the most profound and moving way. We notice a musicality beyond ordinary boundaries, two artists who guess each other's most subtle intentions and a manner of breathing at the same time in Chopin's world. We admire the intense sonority, completely entrancing, this unbridled romanticism wrapped in poetry and the beautiful communion of the two instruments.

Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou are offering us one of the most inspired albums of the year. We do not think that this is a rash assertion. The album is already sitting at the top of the music charts after less than three weeks from its release. Paraphrasing a journalist from the Frankfurter Rundschau, we recognise Sol Gabetta in these poetic sentences, creating an ‛ideal sonority, not only looking for beauty, but for life itself'. The extremely refined and relevant interventions of the young pianist Bertrand Chamayou come in addition to that.