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Cellist
Gabriel Schwabe has been a fast-rising star of his instrument, earning critical comparisons to such greats of the past as
Emanuel Feuermann. In a competition named for
Feuermann, a
Schwabe win touched off the young player's impressive run of contest victories.
Schwabe was born in Berlin in 1988; his background is German and Spanish. His mother was a piano teacher, and he absorbed a great deal of music in her studio when students came for lessons and soon took up the piano himself. He later switched to the violin and was finally drawn to the cello, enrolling at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he studied with
Catalin Ilea.
Schwabe moved on to the Kronberg Academy and the teaching of
Frans Helmerson, and he took master classes with
Janos Starker,
Gidon Kremer, and
Gary Hoffman. Even as a teen,
Schwabe was winning important competitions: after the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in 2006, he won the German National Music Competition the following year and the Pierre Fournier Award in London in 2009.
Both concerto appearances and chamber music performances have been represented in
Schwabe's concert career since then. He has played the
Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and has appeared with Britain's
Philharmonia Orchestra as well as the resurgent
NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the
Royal Northern Sinfonia. In chamber concerts, he has collaborated with such A-listers as
Isabelle Faust,
Christian Tetzlaff,
Albrecht Mayer, and
Nicolai Gerassimez, with whom he gave his recital debut at London's Wigmore Hall in 2010.
Schwabe has appeared at major festivals in Europe and beyond, including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Signed to the Naxos label in 2015,
Schwabe released a
Brahms recital with pianist
Nicholas Rimmer. His relationship with Naxos is an exclusive one, and a 2017 album devoted to the
complete works for cello and orchestra of
Camille Saint-Saëns won critical praise. In 2018,
Schwabe issued a recording of
Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129, with the
Royal Northern Sinfonia under conductor
Lars Vogt. The following year saw
Schwabe join violinist
Tianwa Yang for a recording of the
Brahms Double Concerto, Op. 102, with the
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and in 2020, he joined violinist Hellen Weiß (to whom he is married) on an album of
works by Kodály and Ligeti. He released the album
Elgar, Bridge: Cello Concertos on Naxos in 2021 with the
ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Schwabe is on the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany, and the Konservatorium Maastricht in the Netherlands. ~ James Manheim