Gautier Capuçon plays a piece of nature: a hollow hunk of dark wood from a Venetian tree felled in 1701. He grew up in nature, reveling in the short drive from his native Chambéry—an alpine town in southeast France—to the stunning Lac du Bourget. And he has often performed in nature, transporting his cello to the snowy peaks of Mont Blanc to shoot a music video and his new album cover.
The 44-year-old cellist is also quite worried about nature. In a very short time, he has personally observed a visible change on Mont Blanc: “You think, wow, my God, in one year so many meters of rock disappear. And this is the mountain melting.
“We hear so many scientists nowadays, and I think it’s extremely important to listen to their expertise and everything we hear, which is so frightening, about the climate change,” Capuçon adds, speaking in the midst of a busy European tour. “But I think that when you witness this from your own eyes, it’s something which speaks even more. This is the experience I had, and this is also something I wanted to talk about with the music.”
He’s referring to Gaïa, his new album from Warner Classics/Erato, which he also performed at Davies Symphony Hall on Sunday, November 16, along with a few other soloists and cellists from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Gaïa features newly commissioned works from 16 different composers—including Nico Muhly, Joe Hisaishi, Missy Mazzoli, and Max Richter. The idea, which Capuçon first had several years ago, was to ask an eclectic variety of contemporary composers, some of whom were old friends and some strangers, to write a short piece simply inspired by the Earth.
Cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Jérôme Ducros perform Max Richter’s Sequence for Gaïa at Davies Symphony Hall on November 16, 2025, as a video shows him performing the same work on Mont Blanc among the Alps. Photo by Kristen Loken.
The pandemic slowed everything down, but Capuçon also didn’t want to rush his choice of composers. It was a slow process, emotionally, he explains, “because I selected them with my own emotions. But what I wanted was to have composers who came from different musical genres and different cultures, different backgrounds, to explore, also, the music beyond the classical music world.”
The final roster is indeed a diverse one, spanning from contemporary American darlings of the concert hall to a veteran Japanese film composer to cellist virtuosos from South Africa and London—and even a French DJ. (That would be Michael Canitrot, who wrote a song for cello and singer.) The deliberately limited palette offered to each composer was any combination of cello, piano, voice, or Capuçon’s cello ensemble, Capucelli.
Capuçon has a deep relationship with the San Francisco Symphony; his intended debut in 2009 was thwarted when he had to have an emergency appendectomy, but he returned the following day to play Schumann’s Cello Concerto. “So this was, of course, a debut I will not forget,” he says. He has since performed many times with the orchestra in Davies Hall.
Gautier Capuçon, center, performs with (from left to right) Melissa Lam, Claire Topper, Ethan Lee, Anthony Jung, Timothy Huang, and Cara Wang, cellists from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, at the November 16 Gaïa concert. Photo by Kristen Loken.
The San Francisco Symphony commissioned these works, although none were written for the orchestra. Capuçon “has been a frequent and deeply valued collaborator,” explains Michael Gandlmayr, the symphony’s senior director of artistic planning, “and this project grew very naturally out of that long relationship. When he first discussed the idea with Michèle Corash, one of the Symphony’s devoted supporters and someone who cares deeply about championing new composers and supporting new works, it became clear this was something we wanted to help support and bring to San Francisco.” Gandlmayr cites the symphony’s history of commissioning music for smaller ensembles, including for Julia Bullock’s History’s Persistent Voice project in 2022 as well as for its SoundBox series and other small-ensemble performances. “And we’re especially excited that Gautier wanted to include a composer from the Emerging Black Composers Project,” a competition now in its fifth year, “ultimately choosing Quenton Xavier Blache for a commission for Gaïa.” (The Emerging Black Composers Project is administered by the San Francisco Symphony, with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as a supporting partner.)
Gautier Capuçon “has been a frequent and deeply valued collaborator,” says San Francisco Symphony Senior Director of Artistic Planning Michael Gandlmayr, “and this project grew very naturally out of that long relationship.” Photo by James Holt.
Capuçon says he was surprised by all of the short vignettes that started coming in. “Some of them with very beautiful and sunny, in a way, emotions from their background,” he says, “and some of them with some more anxiousness about the Earth and the climate change. All those composers have a different language, different story—a different vision, maybe—but with the same subject. And yet all of them make one piece. It’s like a main story with 17 different chapters inside, and they all make this incredible, very emotional story.”
Composer and cellist Quenton Xavier Blache, center, discusses his new work, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, at the Gaïa concert. Capuçon is at left and SFSYO cellist Claire Topper is on the right of Blache. Photo by Kristen Loken.
Ayanna Witter-Johnson, a cellist and singer from South London, had never met Capuçon before, and was only passingly familiar with his playing. After doing a deep dive, she quickly realized “he really likes song, and he plays so lyrically and beautifully. I definitely wanted his part to be quite embellished and really sing.”
She composed a literal song—for her voice and their two cellos—as well as the lyrics. “Forever Home” is a proverb, she says, a reminder that “our planet isn’t just a physical place but a sense of community, and that when we come together as a community to take care of our environment, honor our environment, that’s when joyful things happen and we feel that sense of unity.”
Ayanna Witter-Johnson take a bow at the Gaïa performance of her work “Forever Home,” for voice and two cellos, with Capuçon. Photo by Kristen Loken.
Bryce Dessner is a guitarist and songwriter from the indie band The National, but he’s gradually tripled his threat by becoming a formidable composer of film scores and concert works. He goes way back with Mazzoli and Muhly, and he was also on the daring squad of Collaborative Partners when Esa-Pekka Salonen was music director of the San Francisco Symphony. (Salonen premiered Dessner’s Violin Concerto with the orchestra in 2021.) Dessner grew up in Ohio but now resides in the south of France with his French wife, and has known Capuçon for years—and in fact had already written a nature-themed piece for Capucelli called The Forest.
Dessner is the only composer on Gaïa who contributed two pieces: Towards the Light has piano and a more driving energy, he explains, whereas Towards the Forest is essentially just one arpeggio that rolls in and out. “Gaïa is a collaborative album,” Dessner says, “so I didn’t want to write pieces that took 20 minutes or something. They’re little vignettes, and they have a song-like feeling in them, in a way.”
Guitarist and songwriter Bryce Dessner, who has known Capuçon for years, is among the composers on the Gaïa project. Photo by Jens Koch.
One of Capuçon’s oldest friends is Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan pianist and composer. They met some 25 years ago and have played many concerts and traveled around the world together; they recorded the cello sonatas of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev in 2008. She wanted to make her piece a portrait of her friend, who has often talked about his trips to Lac du Bourget.
Pianist and composer Gabriela Montero, who recorded the cello sonatas of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev with Capuçon, wrote a new piece, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, for Gaïa. Photo by Anders Brogaard.
“I wanted it to be something that meant something to him about his childhood and his past,” says Montero, calling a bit jetlegged from London. (She normally splits her time between Barcelona and Maryland.) Like Capuçon himself, she explains, her piece is romantic, a little old-fashioned, and very French. But it’s also about “how we know each other musically,” she says, “and to try and encapsulate all of that experience. It’s like a little X-ray of who he is.”
Thus, Gaïa is both deeply personal to Capuçon and universal to humankind, a beacon of hope and a signal flare of warning. For her part, Witter-Johnson says she wanted to compose “a reminder for us to focus on what brings us together, as opposed to what divides us.” And the new scores, taken as a whole, says Montero, “somehow soothe your soul. I think we need a bit of that.”
