A Mental Tightrope: When Instrumental Musicians Have to Sing, Too

Artists who take up contemporary music sometimes have to sing and play at the same time. The results can be extraordinarily powerful.

There are many difficult moments in Peteris Vasks’s Cello Concerto No. 2, “Klatbutne” (“Presence”). The opening cadenza is exposed and virtuosic; the second movement has intricately rhythmic, Shostakovich-inspired counterpoint. But for the renowned cellist Sol Gabetta, a simple chorale in D minor at the end is the really tricky part, because in that passage she has to not just play, but also sing.

At this point in the concerto, Gabetta, to whom the piece is dedicated, has been playing for over half an hour. Her voice is dry, and she has been leaning over her cello. “And suddenly,” Gabetta, 43, said in a video interview, “you need to be open and sing.”

The effect of Gabetta’s clear voice joining her own cello, as well as two string soloists from the orchestra, is both startling and organic. By design, the conclusion retroactively changes your whole impression of the piece. Vasks conceived the Cello Concerto No. 2 to represent the cycle of life, with the voice’s entrance evoking metaphysical renewal.

“It’s like a birth of a baby which becomes adult, and you can feel that in the music,” Gabetta said. “And then, in the moment when the singing voice is coming up, the person already died, and this is like the spirit living.”

Vasks’s concerto is one of many compositions in recent decades that require musicians trained as instrumentalists to sing while they play, working explicitly with the contrast between their instrumental mastery and their typically untrained yet often expressive voices. This is difficult. It requires excellent aural and physical coordination, a more careful and holistic approach to the posture of playing an instrument, and a certain fearlessness: Instrumentalists must be willing to make a sound they haven’t spent their lifetimes honing.