Taking its title from the Greek goddess of Earth and mother of all life, Gaïa, Gautier Capuçon's new solo album, released today on Warner Classics, is comprised of premiere recordings of seventeen brand new works confronting humanity's relationship to nature from unique and contrasting approaches by many of the world's most innovative living composers. Among them feature several Wise Music Group composers, including Ludovico Einaudi, Bryce Dessner, Missy Mazzolli and Nico Muhly.
Gautier explains - “Each track gives its own voice to the cello, immersing us in the power and depth of nature and the Earth, the source of life ... In each piece, it is the Earth that expresses itself in music: sometimes fragile, sometimes majestic, always essential. … This album is also a song of warning, a hymn to this threatened beauty, a prayer for future generations.”
Dessner contributes two kindred pieces, Towards the Light and Towards the Forest, each inspired by oft-overlooked landscape and nature paintings by Edvard Munch. Towards the Light features Jérôme Ducros on the piano.
Whilst several of the works on the album feature guest musicians, Capuçon performs solo on Mazzolli's The Usual Illusion, a musical illustration of a Fata Morgana mirage, a natural atmospheric phenomenon that distorts the horizon beyond recognition, and on Einaudi's Air about which the composer says:
Air is an air
A flying melody for cello
A song that needs no words
A poem that doesn't need translating
Finally, Muhly's Side Piece features Frank Braley on the piano and is a short piece "obliquely related to the flow of liquid: both predictable (expressed here by patterns) and not (expressed by off hiccoughs or changes in tack). There is also a sense of something elusive, and out of place: the way things lurk beneath the water, and the way we bluithely take it for granted. The piece ends witha kind of hollow effervescence."
Stream or purchase the album now through this link.
