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Few conductors are more in demand than Fabien Gabel. The French maestro made his Paris Opera debut in November, and in March, he led the Indianapolis and Baltimore symphonies for the first time.
Before he heads to the Toronto Symphony for his debut there, area audiences will get their first opportunity to see Gabel in action April 20 and 22-23 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an event that the maestro eagerly anticipates. (The program also will be presented April 21 at Wheaton College.) “I grew up with the recordings of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,” he said. “It’s a legendary orchestra. As a former trumpet player, one of my models was [Adolph] Bud Herseth [the CSO’s principal trumpet from 1948 through 2001]. He was one of my gods.”
The CSO’s all-Russian program will be anchored by Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with Daniil Trifonov, and it will mark the first time that Gabel has worked with the famed soloist. Also featured will be Stravinsky’s Petrushka, a 1911 ballet based on a stock character of Russian folk puppetry.
The program opens with Kikimora, a short, rarely heard tone poem about a female spirit from Slavic folk tales, by Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914). He never attained the fame of some of his Russian peers but was nonetheless a noted teacher, conductor and composer. “Liadov’s music is absolutely stunning,” Gabel said. “It’s really well-crafted and beautifully orchestrated.”
One of the composer’s best-known works is The Enchanted Lake (Volshebnoye ozero), a tone poem or fable-tableau, as he called it, that debuted in 1909. Music Director Riccardo Muti and the orchestra performed it in concerts in October 2021 and on their North American tour this winter.
Though quite different stylistically, all three pieces were written with just a few years of one another, and two of them have strong narratives rooted in folklore. “There’s a very nice thread along the concert from Liadov and Rachmaninoff to Stravinsky,” Gabel said. “So it’s a very beautiful and interesting program.”
Now 47, the Parisian native began taking trumpet lessons at age 6, going on to study in the 1990s at the prestigious Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and later at the Hochscule für Musik Karlsruhe in Germany. Afterward, he played with Parisian orchestras, where he had the chance to get a close look at famed conductors Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle and Muti. “That’s how it started for me,” Gabel said. “That’s how I decided that I wanted to at least try conducting.”
“From that moment, I knew I wanted to be a conductor. But it was a difficult moment to switch, because, of course, I had my career as a trumpet player, and I was quite busy.” — Fabien Gabel
In 2002, he attended what is now known as the Aspen Conducting Academy at the famed Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, which has produced noted alumni like James Gaffigan, music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain, and principal guest conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. The program was led then by its founder, David Zinman, former music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and former chief conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich in Switzerland. “I was a beginner, totally inexperienced,” Gabel said. “From that moment, I knew I wanted to be a conductor. But it was a difficult moment to switch, because, of course, I had my career as a trumpet player, and I was quite busy.”
Two years later, Gabel won England’s Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, gaining him an important early appointment as the London Symphony Orchestra’s assistant conductor in 2004-06. His podium career has taken off from there, with guest appearances with major ensembles such as the Houston Symphony Orchestra and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.
“I really enjoyed playing in orchestras,” he said. “That was a passion for me, but conducting took over playing, and that is something that is really fulfilling for me now. Sometimes, obviously, I miss playing but now I enjoy much more the playing of great players I perform with, so it was very a good move.”
From 2012 through 2021, Gabel served as music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Canada’s oldest professional orchestra, which has a reputation for its devotion to the French musical tradition. He held the same title with Orchestre Français des Jeunes (French Youth Orchestra), a pre-professional training orchestra for musicians ages 16 to 24, from 2017 through 2021.
For now, though, Gabel has no permanent posts and is focused exclusively on guest conducting, but he acknowledged that there are some things in the works that he is not at liberty to discuss. “I’m not in charge of any orchestra,” he said. “I really appreciate my freedom. But let’s see what’s going to happen in the future. I love working in the U.S. I love working in Europe, too, so who knows what is going to happen in the future.”
Among Gabel’s current projects, he working with the Orchestre National de France and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France to record the musical soundtrack for an almost seven-hour restoration of Abel Gance’s much-celebrated silent film, “Napoléon. The 1927 cinematic masterwork uses many innovative techniques for its time to tell the life story of the famed French leader. The French-American composer Simon Cloquet-Lafollye has put together a kind of pastiche score with excerpts from such varied composers as Bartók, Mozart, Mahler and Wagner.
This latest reconstruction of “Napoléon” was overseen by the Cinémathèque Française under Georges Mourier, and is expected to be released in 2024. A four-hour version of the film assembled by famed director Francis Ford Coppola with an accompanying score created by his father, Carmine, toured the United States in the early 1980s. In 2000, British film historian Kevin Brownlow supervised a 5.5-hour restoration, sponsored by the British Film Institute and featuring a score by composer-conductor Carl Davis. That version had its U.S. premiere in 2012, for a screening presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the historic Paramount Theatre in Oakland.
One of Gabel’s passions is the music of French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958). Some of Schmitt’s works, such as La Tragédie de Salomé and Antoine et Cléopâtre, will be excerpted in the “Napoléon” project. “The music is always clear, precise — and difficult,” Gabel said. “But uniformly well-crafted.”
