Gautier Capuçon

Born in Chambéry, Gautier Capuçon began the cello with Augustin Lefèbvre, continued in Paris with Annie Cochet-Zakine and Philippe Muller and then in Vienna with Heinrich Schiff. The André Navarra Prize came to him in 1999 and the New Talent award of the Victoires de la Musique in 2001, and the concerto circuit followed: the principal orchestras of Europe and America, and in chamber music his brother, the violinist Renaud Capuçon, together with Martha Argerich, Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov. He records for Erato — Émotions of 2020 went gold, and Sensations of 2022 reached number one in the French all-genre chart. Teaching has been part of the work since 2014, when he founded the Classe d'Excellence de Violoncelle at the Fondation Louis Vuitton; the foundation carrying his own name, set up in 2022, supports musicians between eighteen and twenty-five. Each summer since 2020 he has taken Un Été en France on the road, giving free open-air concerts in small towns. He plays the 1701 Matteo Goffriller cello known as the Ambassadeur. He was born in 1981 at Chambéry and studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris before Vienna. Destination Paris, released in November 2023 around French repertoire from the concert hall to film scores, brought him the Opus Klassik Instrumentalist of the Year award in 2024, and his Erato catalogue reaches back to the complete Beethoven sonatas with Frank Braley and to Schumann recorded live with Argerich and Haitink. He is an ambassador of the Orchestre à l'École association, which carries classical music to French schoolchildren, and in the 2022–23 season toured with Capucelli, a cello ensemble of his own former students.