Rencontres Musicales | End-of-year concert by Anastasia Kobekina & Beatrice Berrut

Let yourself be carried away by the most beautiful pages of the repertoire, punctuated by a musical surprise to feel the magic of the holidays in an enchanted interlude.

Practical information:
> The concert will be followed by a convivial aperitif with the support of Clos Pachem and its owner, Michel Grupper.
> With the support of Région Dents du Midi
> Beatrice Berrut, piano
> Anastasia Kobekina, cello
> More info on rencontres-musicales.ch

Anastasia Kobekina
> Hailed by Le Figaro as a "musician without equal", Anastasia Kobekina captivates audiences with her dazzling musicality, her interpretations of great depth and her charisma on stage. She is the winner of the Leonard Bernstein Award 2024.

In May 2023, Anastasia signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical. Her first album, Venice, was released in February 2024 and won the prestigious Opus Klassik prize in October of the same year. His next album, devoted to J.S. Bach's suites for solo cello, will be released in September 2025. In February 2025, the German TV channel ARD broadcast a four-part documentary entitled Anastasia Kobekina - Jetzt oder nie ("Now or never"). She made her highly acclaimed debut at the BBC Proms in 2024 with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jakub Hr?ša, performing Dvo?ák's Cello Concerto. In 2025, she will return to the Royal Albert Hall for two new concerts: on August 8 in From Dark Till Dawn, under the artistic direction of Anna Lapwood, and on September 10 with Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto, accompanied by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Delyana Lazarova.

In 2024, Anastasia was featured artist at the Rheingau Music Festival. In 2025, she will be artist-in-residence at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Beethovenfest in Bonn. Highlights of the 2025/26 season include concerts with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Semyon Bychkov, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin with Iván Fischer, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

A particular highlight will be the world premiere of a new cello concerto by Bryce Dessner, written especially for her. Her concerts have taken her to the world's greatest stages and festivals: Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Lincoln Center, Vienna Konzerthaus, Berlin Philharmonie, Zurich Tonhalle, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gstaad Menuhin Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Rheingau Musik Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Festival de Verbier. She has collaborated with such renowned conductors as Semyon Bychkov, Paavo Järvi, Jakub Hr?ša, Krzysztof Penderecki, Heinrich Schiff, Omer Meir Wellber, Vasily Petrenko and Charles Dutoit.

Anastasia is the winner of several international competitions, including the Tchaikovsky Competition (2019) and the Enescu Competition (2016). From 2018 to 2021, she was part of the BBC New Generation Artist program, and in 2022, she received the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. Born in Russia, Anastasia began playing the cello at the age of four. She studied with Frans Helmerson and Jens-Peter Maintz in Germany, Jérôme Pernoo in Paris, and completed her Baroque cello training with Kristin von der Goltz in Frankfurt. She plays on a 1717 Antonio Stradivari "Bonamy Dobree-Suggia" cello, generously loaned by the Habisreutinger-Huggler-Coray Stradivari Foundation.



Beatrice Berrut
> Festivals de Wallonie Associate Artist 2023, Swiss pianist and composer Beatrice Berrut has been called by the Irish Times "an artist who calmly reveals herself in multiple layers of genius and beauty" and "a remarkable musician in every category, who has given electrifying interpretations of the works of Chopin and Bach" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Inspired by Mahler's statement that "tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire", she is a daring musician who wrote about Arnold Schoenberg's major work, "Transfigured Night", a paraphrase hailed by the composer's son, and which is now sought after by the piano community. Her dynamic work as soloist, composer, arranger and artistic director of the festival she founded in Switzerland, "Les Ondes", has positioned her as a cultural visionary on the European art scene.

Her adventures have taken her as soloist on major European stages with orchestras such as the English Chamber Orchestra on a Mozart tour that included stops at London's Cadogan Hall and Geneva's Victoria Hall, to sold-out concerts broadcast live by German radio station NDR at the Hannover Staatsoper with the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester under legendary conductor Mario Venzago, and recitals featuring his transcriptions of Mahler symphonies in such famous venues as Vienna's Konzerthaus and London's Wigmore Hall. His art of transforming Mahler's titanic orchestra into rich, lush piano scores is much appreciated by his peers and the press alike, as these lines from the newspaper Le Monde testify: "His treatment of Gustav Mahler's symphonies consists in transforming the solid gold of the orchestra into the liquid gold of the piano".

His recordings draw on the legacies of European spirituality and mysticism, and explore the vast landscape of music by composers such as Bach and Liszt to create spaces for listeners to gather around a shared experience. Her award-winning discography and her new collaboration with the French label La Dolce Volta have a strong media presence and have greatly contributed to establishing her as an artist who counts in the arts in Europe, enabling her to be invited for interviews and to perform on television programs such as Deutsche Welle's news, TV 5 Monde's cultural program, France 3's Victoires de la Musique, RTS, Classic FM or ARTE.

Convinced that there is only good music and bad music, Beatrice is at ease in a variety of compositional genres, and has been commissioned to write works for both classical music series and films. Her music is rooted in the European tradition - with a particular touch of Ravel and Scriabin-like colors for their devilish virtuosity - and blends with the ethereal influences of American minimalism and the heroic rhetoric of film music. Her creativity has also led her to reshape songs from MUSE and Walt Disney classics to sound like virtuoso piano pieces by romantic composers such as Rachmaninoff, Chopin or Liszt. As Mark Twain would have said: "They didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!

Both an iconoclast and an ardent defender of the classical tradition, Beatrice's desire to democratize classical music and transcend the boundaries between genres led her to create her own festival, where concerts of traditional classical music rub shoulders with klezmer, jazz and flamenco.She also enjoys collaborating with eclectic artists such as world ice skating champion Stéphane Lambiel, with whom she collaborated in 2024 on the ice show L'Apprenti Sorcier, or with the Bonn-based contemporary dance company Cocoon Dance, for a performance of Beethoven's Trio Geister at the Beethovenfest. She was chosen by the Observatoire de l'Université de Genève and the European Space Agency (ESA) to play herself in a short film presenting the GAIA mission, in which parallels are drawn between the tasks of a concert pianist and those of an astrophysicist.

Beatrice Berrut has been a Bösendorfer artist since 2013. This long and fruitful collaboration between the Viennese company and the Swiss pianist is the hallmark of the slightly different sound of Beatrice's recordings.