Sometimes in life — to paraphrase poet Robert Frost — taking the road less traveled can make all the difference.
When Gabriel Cabezas was 4 years old and living in Dallas, his parents enrolled him in a Suzuki music school.
At the time, he really wanted to learn the guitar.
“Unfortunately for me, there were no guitar teachers at this school,” Cabezas said. “But they did have an opening for cello students. And they really wanted to encourage people to play the cello. And so they just sort of gave me one, and that’s where that started.”
Cabezas, an “Artist in Focus" for the Seattle Symphony, will perform with the orchestra multiple times this year.
At Seattle Symphony performances this Thursday and Saturday, audiences will have the opportunity to hear the accomplished cellist, who has built a career playing with orchestras and backing pop stars.
KNKX recently caught up with him to chat about the musical journey that led him to the Northwest this fall.
A career in music
When Cabezas was in middle school, just a decade after he first picked up the cello, he won first place in a national competition for string musicians put on by the Sphinx organization. He’d later win in the competition's senior division.
Cabezas said Sphinx, an organization that supports young Black and Latinx classical musicians, has been integral to his career.
“It was really through the experience of meeting so many professional musicians, and professional musicians of many different backgrounds, that really showed me that a career in music was super, super possible,” Cabezas said. “The prize, also, for this Sphinx competition involves a lot of travel, and a lot of working with orchestras. And that's something that I really fell in love with, even from that early age.”
In addition to playing with orchestras, Cabezas, 32, is in multiple chamber ensembles and has also done studio work for rock and pop musicians like Rufus Wainwright, Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift.
Cabezas played the cello on Swift's collaboration with Bon Iver, evermore.
"Like a lot of orchestral instruments, I think the cello is kind of ubiquitous. Once you start noticing it, it's sort of everywhere,” Cabezas said. “You have certain viral moments, like people noticing the cello in the Netflix series Wednesday, and different things like that, where orchestral instruments are sort of more part of the fabric of everything than you might realize.”
Artist in Focus
Cabezas can be found on the classical stage this week, performing at Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony. New music director Xian Zhang will be conducting Pictures at an Exhibition.
The title of the piece in which Cabeza is featured kind of describes itself.
“'Delights and Dances' is a delight,” Cabezas said with a laugh. “It's a great piece by Michael Abels, a wonderful composer. Listeners might be familiar with him from his work on movies such as Get Out and many others."
Cabezas said the piece includes many different musical styles.
"It has some recognizably classical elements, but also a little bit of bluegrass and blues and these sort of different, very American, forms of music that are sort of present and woven throughout the piece," he said.
In October, Cabezas will be back in Seattle to perform a concerto called Lost Coast by his friend, composer Gabriella Smith. The work is inspired by the rocky coast of northern California.
“I'm super excited to be with the Seattle Symphony this year,” Cabezas said. “It's really unusual to get the chance, especially as a cellist, to come to an orchestra more than once a season."
That also means audiences will have more opportunities to hear Cabezas perform on the cello, an instrument he was paired with by chance but which has become central to his musical career.
