A Collaborative Focus with Gabriel Cabezas

By Esteban Meneses

Cellist Gabriel Cabezas is steeped in the art of collaboration. Like the most enterprising 21st-century classical musicians, he has forged a manifold career not only as a soloist but also as a chamber musician and multi-genre recording artist. Being a member of the chamber sextet yMusic since 2014, and a founding member of the “inverted” string quartet Owls (two cellos, viola and violin), allows him to perform quirky contemporary art music in unusual places while still remaining true to himself as an individual artist. 

“You find yourself in other positions that you can take advantage of as a solo musician, or another opportunity comes up for another group; things are a lot less regimented,” he told me about a month before his September concerts with the Seattle Symphony, where he is an Artist in Focus this season. He appeared as one of the Sphinx Soloists performing Michael Abels’ Delights and Dances, for orchestra and string quartet. 

“While I never really made the decision to have different part-time jobs, I think it’s actually worked out really well for me in that I am able to do a lot of different kinds of playing, which I enjoy,” he said. It has also allowed him to develop symbiotic relationships with his multiple collaborators. “I can respond to what [they] are interested in and to what is interesting to me in the moment, which keeps things fresh.” 

Cabezas was born in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. He relocated when his father, an American Airlines employee, was called to the corporate office near the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. His parents found the local Suzuki-method school, where Cabezas, an only child, first picked up his instrument. The school director’s daughter had just started working at the school and needed cello students, so Cabezas was handed a tiny eighth-sized cello, which looked more like a viola. He was only 4. “They were excited that I was interested in music, but they’re not musicians,” he told me about his parents. “So, in terms of thinking about a career, they didn’t really know what to expect. I mostly just stuck with it and kept playing.” 

The family later returned to Chicago, where the cellist went to school in Wilmette, a North Shore suburb, and finished high school early to enroll in Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music at age 16. He studied with Carter Brey, the principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, who helped him perfect his technique. He graduated in 2013 and, in 2016, received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, having won the national Sphinx Competition in 2006 and in 2012. 

On October 23 & 25, Cabezas, who now lives in Washington, D.C., returns to the Seattle Symphony for two performances of Gabriella Smith’s cello concerto Lost Coast at Benaroya Hall, and two experimental performances with Smith — his friend and collaborator of 15 years and old roommate at Curtis — in Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center on October 24. Lost Coast exists in several versions, taking shape from sketches and workshops that date to 2015. The first and third movements, for cello and orchestra, were composed first. 

The duo later recorded the 2021 album Lost Coast in Reykjavík, Iceland, turning the piece into a three-movement composition for three performers. Smith sings and plays percussion and violin; Cabezas plays cello and percussion; and Nadia Sirota, the album’s producer, adds viola and percussion. The title piece unfolds in grainy, textural swathes. You can almost feel the rugged terrain and endangered ecology that inspired Smith, who takes you on a ride along the remote Lost Coast Trail on the California coastline. Short experimental pieces, including the song “Bard of a Wasteland,” complete the album. The soundworld that it evokes is what we can expect to hear at the 50-minute performances in Octave 9, with Smith singing and playing violin and electronics, and Cabezas using live looping of his cello to overlay and swirl different lines.  

When Smith and Cabezas perform as a duo, they try to make each show loose and spontaneous. “We like it to feel somewhat through-composed at times and bounce around a little bit. We’re still adapting some of the things from the album and also putting in some new things,” said Cabezas. There’s also an element of improvisation, and, when we talked, Cabezas said that they were considering adding pieces by other composers. 

The concerto version of Lost Coast brings the piece back to the orchestral world. In general, the string parts on the record remain in the orchestral version, while Smith’s vocal parts are arranged for wind instruments. The third movement was rearranged, and it includes a cello cadenza. 

“Something else that [Smith] is doing that I’ve helped her with is that for some of her more recent pieces she’ll put a QR code on the front page of the score and it’ll take you to a landing page with videos of the two of us doing these techniques zoomed in on our bows or fingers, so you can see exactly what’s going on,” said Cabezas. Some of the techniques that the orchestra musicians must manage to render Smith’s unusual beds of sound and waves — and that is what characterizes Lost Coast — are pitchless bow bouncing, scratchy overpressure and different kinds of ricochets, in which the bow is gently dropped onto the string to make a bouncy, staccato sound. “A lot of her string language comes from workshopping things herself and with me,” he added. “Especially different textures, different general ideas from a combination of trial and error and discussion and influence.” 

Cabezas continues to juggle the different sides of his career as a soloist, chamber player and entrepreneurial musician, but he seems to have found a way to partake in the best of all possible worlds. “It can be really difficult to spend a lot of time in one arena and then go somewhere else; it can require a lot of different kinds of practice,” he said. “But I think it’s good for my brain, as I continue to try to make this work better and better and better.” 

Gabriel Cabezas performs Lost Coast in the Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony program on October 23 & 25 and is joined by Gabriella Smith for two evening concerts in Octave 9 on October 24.

Gabriel Cabezas’ performances are generously sponsored by the James D. and Sherry Raisbeck Foundation. 

Sphinx Soloists Rubén Rengel, Melissa White, Celia Hatton and Gabriel Cabezas’ performances were generously sponsored by Judith Fong and Mark Wheeler.