Various: Destination Paris, Gautier Capuçon, cello

Gautier Capuçon’s Destination Paris, released on Erato in 2023, is a concept album built around music associated with his own home city — moving freely between core French classical repertoire and popular song and film themes, rather than staying inside a single genre. It won Opus Klassik’s Instrumentalist of the Year award in 2024.

About the programme

The disc pairs unambiguously classical repertoire — Fauré’s Sicilienne, Debussy’s Beau Soir, Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte — with material drawn from French popular song and cinema, including Édith Piaf’s La Foule, the Champs-Élysées standard known in English as Waterloo Road, and The Summer Knows, the theme from the 1971 film L’Été 42. Rather than treating the classical and popular material as separate halves of the record, the sequencing interleaves them, built around the loose idea of a musical portrait of Paris that doesn’t respect the usual boundary between “serious” and “popular” French music.

Why a genre-crossing format like this exists

Programme albums built around a place or theme rather than a single composer or era are a well-established way for an established soloist to reach beyond a purely classical audience without abandoning their own instrument’s core repertoire — the classical pieces on the disc are given the same serious treatment as anything on a conventional solo-cello recital, even as the surrounding programme signals a broader, more crossover-friendly intent. For a cellist with Capuçon’s level of existing visibility, that kind of format functions less as a departure from his concert career than as a studio project built specifically for a listening context — recorded music, rather than the concert hall — where that kind of juxtaposition works differently than it would on a symphony-hall programme.

About the performer

Capuçon has built one of the most visible international careers of any cellist of his generation, both as a soloist and in long-running chamber partnerships, including frequent performances alongside his brother, the violinist Renaud Capuçon. His recording catalogue spans core concerto repertoire, chamber music, and — as here — more explicitly crossover-framed projects, reflecting an artist with enough of an established core audience to experiment with format without it reading as a departure from his own musical identity.

About the award

Opus Klassik, the German classical music awards established in 2018 to replace the discontinued Echo Klassik, has become one of the major annual recognitions in the classical recording industry, with categories spanning individual instrumentalists, ensembles, labels and specific repertoire areas. Capuçon’s Instrumentalist of the Year award in 2024 came for a body of work rather than a single disc in some categories, but Destination Paris — released the previous year and building on his already substantial international profile — sat at the centre of the recognition, reflecting both the commercial reach of a crossover-framed project and the underlying technical command that a genre-crossing format doesn’t require an artist to compromise.

Format note

Destination Paris was released on vinyl as well as digital and CD formats, a choice that fits the album’s own crossover framing — vinyl reissues and new pressings have become increasingly common for classical crossover projects aimed at reaching listeners who might not otherwise buy a conventional classical release, even when, as here, the underlying playing is straightforwardly classical in technique and intent.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic to cover a real, current recording — it isn’t part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive. It’s new coverage of what’s actually being recorded and recognised today, built from independently verified facts about the recording and its performer.