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The Geneva Chamber Orchestra has always ardently championed renowned Geneva composers such as Ernest Bloch, Frank Martin, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Xavier Dayer or Michael Jarrell.
Geneva-based cellist Estelle Revaz has been artist-in-residence of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra since 2017-2018. CANTIQUE, her first CD, was dedicated to concertante works by Swiss composers and featured Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo and the world premiere recording of Andreas Pflüger’s concerto Pitture. For her second release, BACH & FRIENDS – a musical dialogue between Bach’s Solo Cello Suites and works by major contemporary composers – she commissioned a new piece Cantus II from Geneva composer Xavier Dayer.
In the context of her residency, the choice of Frank Martin’s works for cello and orchestra was obvious, all the more so as Dutch musical director Arie van Beek provided a link between the composer’s Swiss origins and the Netherlands, his adopted country. Adding an original piece by Xavier Dayer to the programme seemed another obvious choice. Cantus II for solo cello resulted from a most fruitful collaboration between composer and performer and Xavier Dayer’s international profile fully justified this unique programme combination.

"Enlivened by the dignified and generous cello of Estelle Revaz (the work's dedicatee), the Lignes d'Est score is as deep as it is communicative. Remarkably orchestrated and conducted by Arie van Beek, it links the dramatic projections with an incredible naturalness."

"The "Concerto for Cello and Orchestra" and the "Ballade for Cello and Chamber Orchestra". In each of them, one can measure the talent of the interpreter, the poignant lyricism, the meditative tone that emerges from the first measures of the "Concerto", but also the raw, woody and vigorous vitality that irrigates the more sustained passages. Estelle Revaz's familiarity with this repertoire is obvious; one can hear in every corner a closeness that gives her interpretations a beautiful foundation."

"Estelle Revaz shows herself to be excellent, by the quality of her sound, but especially by the imagination that makes her interpretation very lively. She is very well supported by Arie van Beek and his Genevois, who are also warm and precise."

"Premiered in 1967 by Pierre Fournier and the Basel Chamber Orchestra under Paul Sacher, Martin’s Cello Concerto is highly intense, virtuosic and nuanced in this new recording. Estelle Revaz succeeds beautifully in the slow movement, and she plays the very rhythmic third with great virtuosity. The orchestra under Arie van Beek accompanies with commitment and power, with a fabulously transparent sonority. The Cello Concerto, rather serene in its basic mood, is followed by the darker-toned epic Ballade, in which Revaz is very much involved in bringing out both the reflective and the agitated. She also gives the music something urgent toward the end, so that the interpretation is very tense throughout." Remy Franck

"Frank Martin, the musical autodidact and individualist, combines in his music the brittle beauty and objectivity of Geneva Calvinism with wonderful lyricism and melodicism. It is precisely in this area of tension that Estelle Revaz sets her interpretation of the Cello Concerto and the Ballade. She succeeds without difficulty in seamlessly linking both aspects, emphasizing the rhapsodic character of Martin’s music but not overemphasizing the occasional tonal sharpness. Estelle Revaz does this in a beautiful dialogue, a true exchange of ideas with the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève, where she is artist in residence. Soloist and orchestra make music in a gripping manner, with great intensity – especially in the Ballade. At the same time, the bow is never overstretched, the underlying tone, always subliminally melancholic, never turns into a placative sentimentality. The interpretation of Lignes d’Est by the Geneva composer Xavier Dayer, born in 1972, is also very exciting. Lignes d’Est is a play on words with the first name of the cellist to whom the work is dedicated. Xavier Dayer places different parallel musical lines in space, moving towards the horizon and – unlike in geometry – intersecting and linking on the way. This movement towards each other, the merging of sounds succeeds Estelle Revaz and the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève in a very natural and appealingly communicative way." Guy Engels

"Estelle Revaz - after studies in Paris and Cologne meanwhile an internationally sought-after soloist and chamber music partner - shapes the colorful cello parts of the works sovereignly. She succeeds in lyricism and blossoming cantabile as well as in spirited attacks and subtle pianissimi. Already with the first, wonderfully vibrating notes of the modal original melody, she captivates us "in the most pleasant way". She brilliantly masters the technical demands that Martin's works place on cellists' hands - extended double-stop passages at the beginning of the Ballade, rapid cascades of notes in the finale of the concerto. Her interpretation of the Martin concerto is literally a plea for the rediscovery of this great, completely unjustly little-performed work."

"Estelle Revaz's highly concentrated playing forms a thread that draws the listener into the darker sound worlds of this recording. The tone of Estelle Revaz's cello is typically "French", which is due to the influence of her studies with Jérome Pernoo in Paris: By her own admission, she prefers the ideal of speech to that of singing. All this forms the best possible basis for many subtle interactions with the orchestra. The technical demands of the pieces performed, just because of the intervals played and the delicate double-string passages, must be extreme - but they were masterfully handled by Estelle Revaz and the orchestra, which proves to be an excellent partner."

"Frank Martin's personal language blossoms under the bow of Estelle Revaz, whose playing is full of color and variety - as in the suddenly darker and more painful intonation of the central Sarabande. She is supported by a very incisive conducting by Arie van Beek: The Geneva Chamber Orchestra strikes by the quality and elegance of its sections and the immaculate precision of its winds."

"A new voice in the field of the cello, a sound personality that makes the ear perk up from the first notes. With ardor and sensitivity, but not without rigor, Estelle Revaz gives voice to her instrument, shimmering, biting, gentle or plaintive discourse of which provokes a cascade of unexpected and renewed emotions."

"Estelle Revaz, a cello and a voice. An intact emotion".

"A masterful performance! A deliciously disquieting and well-recorded disc."

"Estelle Revaz plays Frank Martin's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra and his Ballade for Cello and Chamber Orchestra. The sonorities are very rich and it is the occasion for the young Swiss cellist to show all her talent. She continues to demonstrate her talent in the lighter Ballade, which is very radiant. She is at the level of her most illustrious predecessors and one can only be pleased that her great qualities are put at the service of Frank Martin who is not sufficiently played in France. A very beautiful CD to the credit of Swiss musicians!"

"The complicity between the soloist and the ensemble where she was artist in residence for three years is obvious. Her sensitive reading, her phrasing, the generous and radiant sound of her cello, aptly named " Roi-Soleil " (Sun King), are marvelous in her interpretation of Xavier Dayer's concerto, which is infused with Romanian folklore. A world premiere that is already making history!"

"Estelle Revaz's warm and bright cello voice, as well as her sense of style, are precious assets. In any case, this is a very interesting sonic testimony of our neighbour country."

"Estelle Revaz's sound and line are pure, the playing is poetic and takes us to distant lands."

"With her hushed playing and impeccable technique, Estelle Revaz gives a beautiful interpretation of these melancholic and sometimes meditative works, very much in Martin's spirit: sober and uncluttered. Arie van Beek and the Geneva Chamber Orchestra provide a subtle accompaniment that does full justice to the contrasts in timbre, rhythm and dynamics that are so characteristic of the Swiss composer's music."

"Estelle Revaz is by turns introspective, passionate and skittish, and it all works extraordinarily well, especially given the fine quality of the recorded sound."

"All of these pieces are performed with dedication and commitment by Revaz and the orchestra. Her tone is gorgeous throughout, and she extracts deep feeling from every gesture."

"Estelle Revaz embarks on this adventure of alternations between concentrated sound paste and refined lines with a remarkable quality of phrasing, a generous sonority and balanced tempi. Her sensitive reading is highly readable both in the fiery passages and in the meditation. Arie van Beek and the Geneva Chamber Orchestra are irreproachable accomplices. The Ballade for Cello and Orchestra of 1949, written in the same temporal context as the superb Concerto for 7 Wind Instruments, precedes the period when Frank Martin, while remaining in Holland, was to accept a seven-year position as composition professor in Cologne. The declamatory accents at the beginning and end of this fifteen-minute work, with its rhapsodic turns of phrase, allow the soloist to display the two characteristics defined above by the composer, with emotion and well-controlled emphasis, the timbres of the orchestra being ideally suited to her playing. This Frank Martin program is completed by the world premiere recording of Xavier Dayer's Cello Concerto, which bears the subtitle Lignes d'Est. It was commissioned by the Geneva Chamber Orchestra for Estelle Revaz. Lignes d'Est is a one-piece score of just over sixteen minutes, in which the composer specifies that the East evoked is the place of inner research involving a meditative dimension. The inspiration comes from distant reminiscences of Romanian folklore and lets the listener's imagination run wild through subtle and ornamented moments, marked by a personal style in which Xavier Dayer inscribes lyrical passages that leave the door open to reverie. In this context, the cello draws strokes of great clarity whose dramatic breathing is eloquently supported by Estelle Revaz (...). Estelle Revaz is very much at home in this Swiss repertoire, which she serves with conviction and enthusiasm, and which she is right to highlight."

"A talent for catching the light: Estelle Revaz, barely past her thirties, has imposed her silhouette on the classical musical landscape with a level of energy not often felt through the bows."