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Cellist Gabriel Schwabe has been a fast-rising star of his instrument, earning critical comparisons to such greats of the past as Emanuel Feuermann. In a competition named for Feuermann, a Schwabe win touched off the young player's impressive run of contest victories.

Schwabe was born in Berlin in 1988; his background is German and Spanish. His mother was a piano teacher, and he absorbed a great deal of music in her studio when students came for lessons and soon took up the piano himself. He later switched to the violin and was finally drawn to the cello, enrolling at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he studied with Catalin Ilea. Schwabe moved on to the Kronberg Academy and the teaching of Frans Helmerson, and he took master classes with Janos Starker, Gidon Kremer, and Gary Hoffman. Even as a teen, Schwabe was winning important competitions: after the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in 2006, he won the German National Music Competition the following year and the Pierre Fournier Award in London in 2009.

Both concerto appearances and chamber music performances have been represented in Schwabe's concert career since then. He has played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and has appeared with Britain's Philharmonia Orchestra as well as the resurgent NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Northern Sinfonia. In chamber concerts, he has collaborated with such A-listers as Isabelle Faust, Christian Tetzlaff, Albrecht Mayer, and Nicolai Gerassimez, with whom he gave his recital debut at London's Wigmore Hall in 2010. Schwabe has appeared at major festivals in Europe and beyond, including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Signed to the Naxos label in 2015, Schwabe released a Brahms recital with pianist Nicholas Rimmer. His relationship with Naxos is an exclusive one, and a 2017 album devoted to the complete works for cello and orchestra of Camille Saint-Saëns won critical praise. In 2018, Schwabe issued a recording of Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129, with the Royal Northern Sinfonia under conductor Lars Vogt. The following year saw Schwabe join violinist Tianwa Yang for a recording of the Brahms Double Concerto, Op. 102, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and in 2020, he joined violinist Hellen Weiß (to whom he is married) on an album of works by Kodály and Ligeti. He released the album Elgar, Bridge: Cello Concertos on Naxos in 2021 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Schwabe is on the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany, and the Konservatorium Maastricht in the Netherlands. ~ James Manheim

Pianist Nicholas Rimmer is an unusually versatile figure whose activities encompass various kinds of collaboration in addition to solo performance. He has performed chamber music with various major internationally prominent musicians.

Rimmer was born in 1981 in Wigan, England, between Manchester and Liverpool. His family background is English and German, and his professional career has been divided between those two countries. Rimmer was musical from childhood and attended junior classes at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, studying piano, composition, harmony, and conducting. He went on to study musicology at Clare College, Cambridge, receiving his degree in 2000. There, he also served as organist for the Clare College Choir, touring internationally with the group. He made his recording debut on the choir's 2003 recording of John Rutter's Requiem on the Naxos label. In the mid-2000s, Rimmer decided to further his education, studying the song repertory intensively and traveling to Germany for piano classes with Christopher Oakden at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. He also studied with major song accompanists, including Roger Vignoles, Malcolm Martineau, and Justus Zeyen. First prizes at the Birmingham Accompanist of the Year competition in England in 2005 and the German Music Competition the following year raised his profile.

Rimmer has performed and recorded regularly with violist Nils Mönkemeyer, issuing the album Ohne Worte with him on Sony Classical in 2009. He has accompanied such major figures as violinist Tianwa Yang and cellist Gabriel Schwabe, recording with both; his recordings with Yang of the complete music for violin and piano of Wolfgang Rihm earned a Diapason d'Or award in France. Rimmer has co-founded three chamber groups of his own, the Leibniz Trio, Trio Gaspard, and the Trio Belli-Fischer-Rimmer. He has appeared at such top halls as Wigmore Hall in London, the Gasteig in Munich, the Tonhalle Zürich, and the Berlin Philharmonie, and he toured the U.S. with Trio Gaspard. With percussionist Johannes Fischer, he has performed several silent film scores. Rimmer also has an interest in historical performance, and in 2020, he released a solo fortepiano recording on Naxos of unusual piano music by Muzio Clementi. In 2023, again on Naxos, he backed Yang on a recording of four violin sonatas by George Antheil. ~ James Manheim