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The Philadelphia Inquirer
A galvanizing cellist with the orchestra
By David Patrick Stearns
Published: November 7, 2009
Notes don't ring so much as they tend to be wrung from Dvorak's Cello Concerto: It's the grandest piece of its kind and solo cellists can't help loving it to their (and sometimes the audience's) distraction.
Only when the concerto is performed by somebody as original and charismatic as Alisa Weilerstein, the Philadelphia Orchestra's featured soloist yesterday at the Kimmel Center, does one realize how much greater the overall effect can be when individual notes, typically punched and vibrated to the far reaches of the auditorium, have their identity subverted to a larger idea.
The increasingly mature Weilerstein (who is 27 but incongruously looks 14) has always been one to make you momentarily forget past performances in the most standard of repertoire. What she accomplished yesterday was like a throwback to the pre-World War II years of Emanuel Feuermann, when any Dvorak soloist was likely to be the orchestra's principal cellist (Yo-Yo Ma's stardom is a historically recent phenomenon) and more inclined to play as a less competitive team member.
So it was yesterday. The first movement's long introduction, led by guest conductor Peter Oundjian, seemed expressively uncertain right down to the horn solo. Yet Weilerstein's entrance had something of a galvanizing effect on the overall ensemble; everyone suddenly knew exactly what they were about. The horn/cello interplay had much to say. Even more revealing was Weilerstein's third-movement duet with associate concertmaster Juliette Kang. Dramatic contrast wasn't lacking in the least; the music takes care of that just fine.
The concerto's solo writing can seem like a long trudge when cellists try to achieve an endlessly evolving Wagnerian sense of line. Somewhat in the spirit of the early-music movement, Weilerstein delivered smartly molded episodes, each building on the last, creating a series of emotional incidents that contributed to the whole.
A less resourceful cellist could seem to dither; Weilerstein was the opposite. That was partly thanks to her youthful energy, partly due to a technique that gives transparency to every expressive intention. Purely from a technical standpoint, Weilerstein was almost shockingly accurate in her pitch, particularly in upward leaps that are almost never played spot-on.
The New York Times
Classical Music Takes Center Stage at the White House
By Anthony Tommasini
Published November 5, 2009
WASHINGTON — Wednesday was classical music day at the White House. The festivities and performances were sponsored by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, created by executive order in 1982. The first lady serves as honorary chairwoman of the committee, and Michelle Obama, fully embracing that function, has created a White House Music Series.
Earlier daylong programs celebrated jazz, country music and Latin music. Classical music had its turn on Wednesday. The celebration ended with a concert in the East Room with President and Mrs. Obama as hosts, and featuring performances by four acclaimed American musicians: the violinist Joshua Bell, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, the guitarist Sharon Isbin and the pianist Awadagin Pratt.
Mr. Obama opened the concert with welcoming remarks, sketching the history of classical programs in the East Room, which go back 120 years. Not afraid to show himself a bit of a classical music novice, he counseled those who did not know where to applaud not to worry, but added: “I have Michelle to help me. The rest of you are on your own.”
The program was a sampler, ending with the finale of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Trio, but substantive. It included Mr. Pratt’s herculean transcription of Bach’s organ Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor and Ms. Weilerstein’s volatile account of the final movement of Kodaly’s Sonata for Solo Cello.
An event of special meaning took place in the afternoon, when Mrs. Obama welcomed a group of some 120 students from community music schools across the country to a workshop. The four guest artists played for the students and also played with several of them, having worked with them in private morning sessions at the White House.
If Sujari Britt, a perky 8-year-old cellist who studies at the Manhattan School of Music, was nervous about playing a Boccherini duo for two cellos with Ms. Weilerstein in the East Room as Mrs. Obama looked on from the front row, she did not show it. She played the genial melody with mature sound and shapely phrasing and, when the roles switched, nimbly dispatched the undulant accompanimental figure.
Ms. Weilerstein also played “The Swan,” the familiar Saint-Saëns cello piece, in an arrangement for cello and marimba. Here she was joined by a lanky, shaggy-haired 16-year-old percussionist, Jason Yoder, a junior in the music department at the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, who played gently flowing accompanimental patterns as Ms. Weilerstein brought plush beauty to the yearning melody.
Both of the performances with the young musicians were repeated at the evening concert to standing ovations.
Mr. Bell, who had worked with a group of young violinists in the morning, gave them an inadvertent and useful lesson that any performer, no matter how accomplished, can get into a jam. Playing a lyrical Cantabile by Paganini for violin and guitar with Ms. Isbin, he mistakenly jumped ahead near the end of the piece, then stopped. “I’ve taken a wrong turn,” he said. He had skipped a couple of phrases, he explained. So he and Ms. Isbin simply ended the piece a little early.
Mr. Bell’s self-effacing demeanor seemed to delight his young listeners as much as his brilliant account of a splashy piece by Vieuxtemps, a virtuosic fantasy on “Yankee Doodle.”
The day had begun in the State Dining Room with Mrs. Obama honoring the winners of the committee’s Coming Up Taller Award, given to successful programs across the country intended to reach students who have insufficient opportunities to explore the arts.
Awards were also given to arts programs in the committee’s partner nations, Mexico, Egypt and China.
The name of the award evokes the pride that students feel when given the chance to find their voices through the arts, Mrs. Obama said. She praised the teachers and mentors of these influential programs, who show young people not just “the power of their imaginations” but “the power of discipline and hard word and of teamwork as well.”
She spoke movingly of children who grow up in major cities where arts institutions thrive yet feel that those resources might as well be miles away. The arts and music have a place not just in our museums, theaters and concert halls, she said, but in “the halls of this White House.” She wants the White House to be a showcase for the arts, she added.
Asked after the workshop whether the Obamas’ gesture in celebrating classical music at the White House will help demystify the art form and bring it needed attention, Ms. Weilerstein said, “If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what does.”
AnnArbor.com
Alisa Weilerstein plays with fire and verve in her local debut
By Susan Isaacs Nisbett
Published: October 9, 2009
In its length, in its music, and most of all, in the playing, the recital that cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnatan played Thursday evening at Hill Auditorium was welcomely full to the brim. And for the audience hearing the 27-year-old Weilerstein for the first time as she made her University Musical Society debut, it was an introduction to a young cellist who is thrillingly the real deal, playing - like her terrific partner, Barnatan, who has appeared here before - from the inside out, passionately so, and with a big, juicy sound that grabs you by the throat and simultaneously pastes a smile on your face that stays the whole night. I can’t recall when I’ve enjoyed a recital more.
If much of the evening’s playing - in music of Beethoven, Britten, Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff - was white-hot, what was striking in the opening adagio of the Beethoven Cello Sonata No. 2 in g minor, Op. 5, No. 2, which began the concert, was the breathtaking poise of the music-making, with silences as potent and palpable as the phrases they separated. And then - whammo! a rhapsodic release in the ensuing allegro, with big, gutsy, almost organ-like sound.
What made the music so thrilling goes beyond that, though: the pair’s broad emotional and timbral palette - for brio and orchestral sound, the concluding rondo was unbeatable (I loved the bass growls and playfully rustic little-piggy grunts Weilerstein produced) - and a unity of spirit between the two that far exceeds notions of tight ensemble.
The Britten Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 65, was a compelling adventure of a different sort. If you didn’t check the title of the first movement -- “Dialogo,” i.e., “Dialog” - it didn’t much matter. The conversation was as clear as, well, the voice of someone near you on a cell phone (and the person on the other end). The conversation partners here, cello and piano, exchange monosyllables, then longer phrases; the couple argues in musical outbursts.
The wonderful thing, as the quartet proceeded, was how Weilerstein and Barnatan took the conversation through all the movements: the sense of speech never left, whether in warbling calls back and forth at the end of the scherzo, or ostinato figures in the “Elegia” that read like the repeated statements of someone who just can’t leave a point alone.
With Stravinsky’s “Suite Italienne,” which opened the concert’s second half, the audience was in quite familiar territory: most probably heard it once already this season, in the UMS opening concert with violinist Itzhak Perlman. But here we had the cello and piano, and a new look that went beyond the change of instrumental register and slightly differing versions.
Weilerstein and Barnatan, for example, shaped a quite smooth “Introduzione” that nonetheless offered such crisp rhythmic diction and fleet ornamentation that it became awfully playful. That razor-edge rhythmic sense pervaded the whole suite; the “Tarantella” - repeated later as an encore - was so exciting the audience burst into wild applause though there was yet another, more soulful movement to come.
Soulfulness found its fullest outlet in the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata in g minor, Op. 19, that ended the evening. If you were looking for luscious, ripe melodies, or for luscious, ripe playing - or for roiling torments and G Major triumph - all were gorgeously rendered here. The standing ovation that followed was the least the audience could do in response.
Incident Light
From Cellist Weilerstein, extraordinary depth and intensity in Shostakovich Concerto No. 1
By Mike Greenberg
Published: September 26, 2009
The greatest artists go for the jugular. They draw blood. They change you.
Alisa Weilerstein is such an artist. With the San Antonio Symphony under guest conductor Rossen Milanov, Weilerstein was the guest soloist in Dmitri Shostakovich's harrowing Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat on the opening concert, Sept. 25, of the orchestra's 70th anniversary season. The Majestic Theater program opened with Antonin Dvorak's sparkling "Carnival" Overture and closed with Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 1
It seems almost and impertinence to identify Weilerstein as a cellist. She does, of course, play the cello, brilliantly, and she summons from her instrument an uncommonly rich sound enlivened with torrents of overtones. The materiality of her instrument seems always to be immediately present. Yet there is a sense in which that materiality vanishes behind Weilerstein's extraordinary interpretive depth and emotional intensity - an intensity that attains its most exquisite extreme in the faintest whispers.
In her first appearance with this orchestra, in 2005, Weilerstein's vehicle was Franz Joseph Haydn's Concerto in D, a congenial piece that did not allow full vent to her musicianship. The Shostakovich concerto did. The extent to which Shostakovich's music reflexts animus against Stalinist tyranny and stupidity is open to debate, but it seems undeniable that he bared a troubled soul in his scores. Much of this concerto is despairing, angry, sometimes ugly. It is also at times achingly beautiful, which a lyricism tinged by the knowledge of mortality.
All of which Weilerstein delivered with precision. Especially memorable were her wonderful pitch inflections and shadings of vibrato (from none to lots) in the slow movement and, in the solo cadenza that constitutes the entire third movement, her trajectory from gorgeous, full-throated lyricism to blind rage.
Milanov and the orchestra gave her a shapely, cleanly detailed backdrop, with an especially fine solo contribution by principal hornist Jeff Garza.
Weilerstein's generous encore was "Omaramor," a 1991 work by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. The title is a tribute in part to the exiled Argentine playwright Omar del Carlo and partly to one of the biggest hits of Argentine popular singer Carlos Gardel, "My Beloved Buenos Aires." The piece has aspects of tango, but also of Bach's cello suites. Weilerstein played it with admirable empathy.
Chicago Tribune
Young cellist’s eloquent debut a high point at CSO’s Dvorak Festival
By John von Rhein
Published: June 13, 2009
When the dust clears from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Dvorak Festival, someone really should make Mark Elder an honorary Czech. The British conductor appears to have this music in his blood, if not by heritage then by artistic adoption. And he has the skills to inspire the CSO to play Dvorak better than just about any orchestra this side of the Moldau.
The warmly sympathetic readings he directed Thursday night at Orchestra Hall were distinguished above all by a natural feel for the ebb and flow of glorious melody that set Dvorak apart from his German contemporaries.
Elder began his program with “In Nature’s Realm,” one of several rarely heard concert overtures (and tone poems) he is sprinkling throughout the festival. He pointed up its scenic qualities through an emphasis on local color, soft nuances and felicitous balancing of strings and winds.
Thus far he has introduced festival audiences to two exceptionally gifted young string soloists. The latest was cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who made her CSO debut in an intense and eloquent account of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.
Her tone is huge and deep, and she has a wonderfully pliable way of shaping the singing lyricism. The 27-year-old cellist spanned the full emotional range from poignancy to ebullience, bringing out an abundance of sentiment while avoiding sentimentality.
Elder had the orchestra players listening just as acutely to the cellist as she did to them, witness her tender duet with the clarinets in the slow movement. She tore into the outer movements with unbridled vigor, pulling back to a rapt hush to savor contrasting melodies.
I found myself listening with senses heightened to a masterpiece so familiar that it is easy to take for granted. The crowd was up on its feet in stentorian appreciation.
Chicago Sun-Times
New CSO soloist finds Dvorak insights;
Cellist Weilerstein takes daring approach
By Andrew Patner
Published: June 13, 2009
The goal of a composer-themed festival is to dig deep and try to find lessons, patterns and connections through immersion in a single creative voice that might not be apparent in the occasional performance or listening.
When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced a festival of the works of Antonin Dvorak, there were probably many who thought that this might be pushing the festival concept a bit much.
But under conductor Mark Elder’s passionate leadership, with Chicago debuts of two extraordinary string soloists and with key chamber music and vocal components still to come, the Dvorak Festival already has more than made its case for the Czech composer as an artist of depth and range as well as popularity and nationalism.
Thursday night at Symphony Center, the CSO began with a once staple and now mostly unplayed overture, “In Nature’s Realm,” written in 1891 just before Dvorak moved to the United States. In it, he’s heard working on the evocations of Bohemian forests and spirits that he would perfect several years later in his great operas.
One would think that the Cello Concerto would, in contrast, be wholly familiar, so popular has the work been almost since its composition in New York in 1895. But so daring was the playing of soloist Alicia Weilerstein and so committed the partnership of Elder and the CSO that Dvorak’s genius for complex creation as well as spinning out winning melodies was almost palpable.
With a huge, almost athletic sound, Weilerstein, 26, somehow combines intense physicality with a deep intellectualism. Old and much loved tunes seemed to be being written on the spot and there was real excitement in the air.
Boston Globe
Two Debuts and Some Blazing Brahms
By Jeremy Eichler
Published: March 20, 2009
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Hans Graf, conductor
At: Symphony Hall (Thursday night, repeats today and Tuesday)
Who doesn't love a mighty big-boned Romantic concerto from time to time? The problem is that too often these warhorses just aren't played with real conviction or a burning sense of purpose. And few things are more depressing than hearing a famous but road-weary soloist phone in a vapid performance of a piece that's supposed to explode from the stage. In those moments, the entire classical music star system feels broken, and the music sounds just as tired as the performer.
I'm happy to report that none of that applies this week at Symphony Hall, as two big emerging talents in the classical world - violinist Janine Jansen and cellist Alisa Weilerstein - are making their subscription debuts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Thursday night, with guest conductor Hans Graf on the podium, they lit a blazing fire beneath the Brahms Double Concerto. If you know anyone who might be susceptible to the visceral thrills of classical music but has not yet clicked in to this art form, take them to this concert - or at least the first half.
Weilerstein was in the zone from the outset, rendering the cello's major opening statement with a large, full sound and an arresting tone that somehow seemed to face outward and inward at the same time. From her first entrance as well, Jansen showed an ear for eloquently inflecting the intervals and leaps in the violin line while at the same time almost ideally matching Weilerstein's temperament and rhapsodic style.
As the movement continued, the soloists also seemed intent on finding some of the classical elegance in passages of string writing that often get attacked with brute force. The second movement had a lyrical chamber music-like delicacy, and the finale felt fresh with Weilerstein's expansive phrasing again setting the tone. For her part, Jansen also had a way of turning up the gas at the end of an emphatic phrase such that the music landed with just that extra bit of force. Graf's accompaniment was sensitive if a bit on the cool side for such a warm-blooded reading.
After intermission came Bruckner's immense Seventh Symphony. It's no wonder that Bruckner's colossal works have become a tough sell in the age of instant messaging and Twitter. This epic piece lasts well over an hour and asks us to rewire our internal clocks as we track the vast symphonic landscape that opens up slowly before the ears. Thursday night, Graf's account seemed to marvel at that landscape's sheer tonal beauty, more than its emotional intensity or dramatic sweep. Some passages also had a heavy tread when lightness was required. Still, the brass were potent and the strings sounded rich and resonant, with the final pizzicato of the second movement ringing as if produced by some vast cosmic cello. Miami Herald
Young Cellist Weilerstein Shows Mature Artistry In Dvorak
By Lawrence A. Johnson
Published: December 18, 2008
A decade ago, a teenage cellist performed a demanding recital of Bach, Brahms and Tchaikovsky at North Park College in Chicago. While interpretively unseasoned in some respects, her passionate temperament and technical acumen demonstrated that the young musician already possessed the potential for a major career.
Alisa Weilerstein, now 26, made her Broward Center debut Wednesday night in Fort Lauderdale with the Florida Symphony, an event presented by the Concert Association of Florida. And it was clear that even in an era bursting with gifted young string players, Weilerstein is the real thing.
Daughter of Donald Weilerstein, longtime first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, she is now carving out a major career under her own banner, including debuts this season with the Boston Symphony and Chicago Symphony amid other high-profile appearances.
Like his Symphony No. 9 and the American string quartet, Dvorak’s Cello Concerto is a product of the Czech composer’s U.S. sojourn. There are good reasons why it remains established as the most popular cello concerto in the repertoire with a well-judged blend of minor-key drama and folk-flavored melody in Dvorak’s characteristic style. The solo part is deftly balanced between virtuosity and expressive potential, skillfully deployed in the cello’s higher register to make it shine over the orchestra. Not for nothing did Brahms say that if he knew it was possible to write a cello concerto like this, he would have done so himself years ago.
Alisa Weilerstein possesses a sterling technique, one that allows her to live dangerously, with wide extremes of tempos and dynamics. Yet though her openly emotional playing is reflected in her Yo-Yo Ma-like stage presence, —eyes closed, swaying to the music—her playing is not indulgent or self-communing. More than most performances of Dvorak’s warhorse, she affectingly brought out the deep vein of sadness and melancholy in this music.
To be sure, there was ample bravura with the virtuosic pages dispatched as cleanly as one could wish, often at lightning tempos. But what distinguishes Weilerstein’s art was the extraordinary delicacy and half-tones of her soft playing. Rarely will one hear the lovely second theme of the opening movement lifted so tenderly or such seamless liquid phrasing. In her hushed, inward rendering of the slow movement’s cadenza, the cellist winnowed her tone down to a silvery, barely audible thread.
There was no lack of bite or drama in the final movement or the fiery coda, but, again it was the ineffable tenderness and nostalgic introspection of the final epilogue, as Weilerstein lingers, ruminating on the previous themes that really stays in the memory. A sensitive, heartfelt performance, and Weilerstein will be back in April to perform Golijov with the New World Symphony and Marin Alsop. New York Magazine
Alisa Weilerstein, at 26, is too big a talent to be pidgeonholed.
By Justin Davidson
Published: December 14, 2008
Like a painter intimating a composition in a single brushstroke, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein needed no more than a few measures of music to reveal the full depth of the evening ahead, her Zankel Hall recital debut. The run up a D-major chord at the beginning of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata, Op. 102, No. 2, could hardly be a simpler gesture, and Weilerstein kept it that way. She didn’t load it down with spurious expression or squeeze pathos out of the quick drop from loud to soft. But when she landed on that sweet high A, her bow glided on the string as if scudding across a series of tiny landscapes. She never produces a note that merely sits there, honking evenly to the end of its allotted time. Instead, the bow shifts speed, lightening or intensifying in minuscule gradations, sketching out a compact epic in a quick little A.
At 26, Weilerstein has surely discovered her limitations, but if so, she hasn’t shared them with the public. I’ve heard her play Osvaldo Golijov’s rapturous and improvisational Azul; Elgar’s flickering, half-lit concerto; and Penderecki’s bipolar Second Concerto. Her recital covered an enormous amount of terrain, from Beethoven and the midnight effusions of the Chopin Cello Sonata to a dark tango by Golijov to Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello, a lonely tour of the human soul. Golijov and Kodály both send the cellist out on her own, without the comfort of a piano by her side, and Weilerstein thrived in that exposed solitude. Kodály’s sonata is no inward meditation, but a work of public drama, thick with explosive dissonances, folk melodies, and spectacular athleticism. It opens with a pair of “listen to me” chords, which might sound hectoring or pompous but which Weilerstein delivered as a sudden thought, like an actor entering in mid-monologue. Over a half-hour, she traversed a Shakespearean soliloquy, careering from orchestral blasts of rage to quiet wit and the hushed ecstasy of stroked harmonics.
Whatever she plays sounds custom-composed for her, as if she has a natural affinity with everything. This is not the usual way in the classical-music world, where performers learn early to typecast themselves. Singers use the German word Fach (category) to describe the confluence of physicality, temperament, and training that makes them, say, Rossini soubrettes, or savage Straussian matriarchs. With far less logic, instrumentalists, too, tend to embrace particular chunks of repertoire or confining styles. They cast themselves as adoring specialists who keep massaging their relationships with a few composers; self-abnegating fundamentalists who consider the score infallible and performance a matter of correct execution; cautious scholars who derive each interpretive decision from rigorous analysis; or flamboyant iconoclasts who treat a piece of music as putty to be molded by their personalities. There are other stock characters of the concert stage, and I hope Weilerstein keeps clear of them all. The New York Times
A Passionate Young Cellist Engages the Ear and the Eye
By Steve Smith
Published: December 10, 2008
At 26 the cellist Alisa Weilerstein can seem mature beyond her years. Though buoyant and youthful, she approaches the works she plays with an oversize presence. Already her musical personality — a combination of curiosity and intensity — is well developed and unmistakable. In a sense Ms. Weilerstein is a throwback to an earlier age of classical performers: not content merely to serve as a vessel for a composer’s wishes, she inhabits a piece fully and turns it to her own ends.
She is also great fun to watch, a point made over and over during a recital she presented with Inon Barnatan, 29, a stylish young pianist, at Zankel Hall on Tuesday night. True, an artist’s animated stage comportment hardly guarantees an insightful performance. But in Ms. Weilerstein’s case, what you see perfectly meshes with what you hear.
In Beethoven’s Cello Sonata in D (Op. 102, No. 2), which opened the program, she played with a warm, inviting sound and flawless intonation. Strong chords unapologetically pushed to the edge of coarseness were matched by vehement flashes in her eyes.
When the music turned gentle, Ms. Weilerstein shot coy glances over her shoulder at Mr. Barnatan as she sneaked up on swooning notes. That this pair is temperamentally well matched was demonstrated by a gripping Adagio, taken at a daringly broad pace that sometimes dipped into contemplative silences.
Ms. Weilerstein has made a specialty of Zoltan Kodaly’s Sonata for Solo Cello and clearly savors its songfulness and improvisatory flow. Performing from memory, she dug into the work with brilliant technique and an earthy gusto.
After an intermission Mr. Barnatan offered a gracefully rippling account of Chopin’s Barcarolle in F sharp, an evocation of a Venetian gondoliers’ song. Ms. Weilerstein countered with Osvaldo Golijov’s “Omaramor,” a tango-inspired solo work by turns seductive and brusque.
The pair closed with Chopin’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, a work of such fiendish difficulty that even Chopin was convinced that parts of it might be unplayable. Ms. Weilerstein and Mr. Barnatan put that notion to rest with their poise and passion, and they returned amid thunderous applause to reprise the work’s limpid Largo as an encore. The Philadelphia Inquirer
Weilerstein is in peak form as cellist
By David Patrick Stearns
Published: December 7, 2008
Though still only only 26, cellist Alisa Weilerstein is becoming a regular Philadelphia presence, invariably striding onto the stage with an eager air of "Look what I've discovered this time!"
That keeps you coming back to her concerts, even with snowy Saturday weather to navigate en route to Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park - the first stop in a recital tour that includes New York's Zankel Hall tomorrow and San Francisco Thursday. And the discoveries? The seldom-heard 1991 Omaramor by the now-popular Osvaldo Golijov, plus a distinctively smart approach to Beethoven.
Weilerstein was in peak form technically, poetically and intellectually. Overall, her music-making with pianist Inon Barnatan had broad, expansive tempos and daringly long rhetorical pauses - maybe not the safest approach with a not-necessarily-classical family audience. But never did listener attention flag. And how could it? Weilerstein has taken on maturity without losing her youth, an entrancing combination.
Beethoven often shows what work musicians have been doing and what lies ahead. And in the slow movement of the composer's Cello Sonata No. 5 Op. 102 No. 2, Weilerstein's sound was intense yet restrained and relatively free of vibrato, creating an effect wholly appropriate to the emotional temperature of the music, and one that might be described as an ethereal laser beam. I've never heard anything quite like it. The first movement, though, revealed her tendency (a waning one) to play hard into her cello in ways that gives her presence magnetism but leaves her chords somewhat indistinct and colorless.
In that respect, Chopin's Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 65 was questionable programming: The cello competes with highly developed piano writing that inevitably prompts Weilerstein to dig into her strings. But excess was only occasionally apparent. And with that came an insistent conviction, revealing a piece furiously packed with incident that also walks the line between such apparently mutually exclusive emotional states as despair and charm.
Kodaly's Sonata for Solo Cello and the Golijov, on each side of the intermission, were great counterparts, showing composers of different generations and nationalities tapping the power of grassroots song (Kodaly with Hungarian folk music, Golijov with Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel) with barbarically forceful creative freedom.
Weilerstein commented how the Kodaly can sound improvised; in her hands, both pieces did, thanks to bold phrasing that almost exerted a gravitational force - when not having a weightlessness almost too airy to be real.
The New York Times
Restless Composer, Desperate Concerto
By Vivian Schweitzer
Published: November 22, 2008
Some composers never stray far from one aesthetic path, while others change course entirely. The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, who turns 75 on Sunday, has explored a range of idioms, from avant-garde to neo-Romantic, during his career, sometimes combining disparate traditions in works like his Second Cello Concerto.
David Goldman for The New York Times
Lorin Maazel and Alisa Weilerstein.
Alongside its generous nod to Romanticism and traditional orchestral forms, the concerto also incorporates Penderecki trademarks, like strange microtonal moanings in the strings. The dynamic cellist Alisa Weilerstein played the difficult solo part with almost savage intensity on Thursday at Avery Fisher Hall, during a fine performance with the New York Philharmonic, led by Lorin Maazel.
Mr. Penderecki wrote this concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1982, the year Ms. Weilerstein was born. The composer attracted international attention during the 1960s with sonically adventurous works, but during the ’70s conducted 19th-century scores and began to experiment with a more lyrical style and traditional forms, earning him scorn from modernist colleagues.
The mood of this searingly emotional concerto is mostly dark and frenzied, veering between mild anxiety and enveloping despair. At one point in the score — which is full of chromatic passages, rhythmically complex dialogue between soloist and ensemble, and weeping cello melodies — the violins buzz like disgruntled bees over a solitary low drone from the cello.
The darkness is penetrated from time to time by almost incongruously jovial percussion outbursts and lyrical cello interludes, which Ms. Weilerstein played with passionate commitment. Mr. Maazel aptly illuminated Mr. Penderecki’s varied sonic landscapes.
The concert began with Mr. Maazel leading a rather regimented and joyless rendition of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 6, which despite some spirited playing from the violists Cynthia Phelps and Rebecca Young, lacked the necessary buoyancy in the outer movements. The small ensemble of two violas, cello, double bass, harpsichord and two viola da gambas (an instrument too soft-spoken to make much of a statement in Avery Fisher Hall) could probably have managed fine without a conductor.
But there was no lack of momentum in the terrific performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 that concluded the program. Mr. Maazel elicited transparent, lithe and animated playing from the orchestra, leading a driven first movement and an Andante notable for its lilting poise. The musicians stormed with blazing energy through an inspired, magisterial finale. San Jose Mercury News
Cellist Weilerstein Steals Show in S.F.
By Richard Scheinin
Published: June 27, 2008
The San Francisco Symphony played the opening passages of Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor with big, swaying intensity on Wednesday. Still, that auspicious beginning barely hinted at the bold emotions, the gates-open communicativeness, of the performance by soloist Alisa Weilerstein that was about to be unleashed.
It's hard to fathom how this 2004 Columbia graduate can channel the emotional life of a work like this one, completed in 1895 by a Czech whose bighearted sentimentality seems eons away from our own age of irony. But channel she did: The 26-year-old cellist's performance at Davies Symphony Hall with guest David Robertson leading the orchestra was gripping - unobstructed, unself-conscious, straight to the heart.
Technically outstanding, too. And cagey, in that Weilerstein's shaping of each phrase, and her building of a larger structure, element by element - it all indicated a cool, clear intellectual understanding of the piece. And yet, almost note to note and certainly with each climax, her playing felt
charged with spontaneity, a natural off-the-cuff musicality.
A lot has been written about her musical upbringing; she's the daughter of celebrated players - Donald and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, violinist and pianist, respectively - with whom she tours as a trio. But the back story would seem to be receding as she emerges as one of the leading cellists of the day, a player of strength, sincerity, subtle control and genuine personality. She
repeats her program tonight and Saturday at Davies.
Wednesday, her very first passages were wrenched from the cello: stinging notes; urgent, singing effects; intensity of vibrato; every note and chord the product of deep, clear physical and emotional effort. Here and there was a rough spot, but it only added to the realness of her interpretation. And just watching the way Weilerstein had mapped out her fingerings and shifts, moving guitarlike through treacherous sequences of chords, was fascinating.
In the second movement, Dvorak lets the cellist play utterly alone for a few moments, without any orchestral accompaniment. Weilerstein,
whose bow control and dynamic range are exceptional, played beyond wispy-soft. She lit into the third movement's opening passages, seeming a little fatigued, but only momentarily. And now something else about her became extra clear: She is a great listener.
Half a measure before the solo entrance of associate concertmaster Nadya Tichman, Weilerstein, who had been looking at Robertson, to her left, turned toward Tichman, to her right and, with a smile, joined the violinist for a buoyant duet.
In the first half of the program, Robertson led the orchestra through a crisp, luminous performance of Lutoslawski's "Mi-Parti," from 1976. The music was more than vaguely threatening, and beautiful, in its way - and from a different planet than Dvorak. Janacek's "Taras Bulba" ended with gleaming sound-blocks, mimicking the tintinnabulations of bells.
But Weilerstein, frankly, was the show.
New York Times
For One Night, a Feeling of Caramoor on the Seine
By Steve Smith
Published: June 23, 2008
...The concert opened with Bernstein’s “Paris Waltz” from “Candide,” after which Ms. Weilerstein was featured in Fauré’s “Élégie” and Bernstein’s “Three Meditations from ‘Mass.’ ” Watching Ms. Weilerstein can feel a bit like spying on someone’s most intimate moments, so unguarded and impassioned are her expressions. Her sound in both works was rich and throaty, her phrasing gracious and singing. She thundered impressively in the agitated threnody that erupts midway through the Fauré, and was appropriately spidery and brittle in the third “Meditation.”
Boston Globe
A cellist with fervor, and maturity beyond her years
By Jeremy Eichler
Published: May 7, 2008
Like many sons and daughters of entrepreneurial parents, Alisa Weilerstein has gone into the family business. That business happens to be classical music-making at a distinguished level. Her father, Donald Weilerstein, was the founding first violinist of the Cleveland String Quartet, and her mother is the pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein.
Alisa Weilerstein grew up with music as the lifeblood of her family, not unlike her contemporary Jonathan Biss, and she is now building an impressive solo career, with recordings and a slew of dates with major orchestras. Her first performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra come next season, and Sunday afternoon she made her local recital debut in Jordan Hall, presented by Celebrity Series of Boston as part of its highly valued yet soon-to-be defunct Boston Marquee series.
Given what Weilerstein has accomplished at age 26, I'm sure no one expected a raw ball of nerves to take the stage. But even knowing the back story did not fully prepare one for the poised and mature artistry of this highly gifted young cellist. From the opening work, Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 5 (Op. 102, No. 2) played with pianist Inon Barnatan, she demonstrated not only a remarkably well-honed technical vocabulary, but also something far less common: an expressive depth and fervor that made it clear she had something important to say.
Her tone in the Beethoven was smooth, full, and graceful, and she enjoyed an easy and fluid rapport with Barnatan. But it was in Kodaly's rugged solo sonata, a work that is - or should be - her calling card, that Weilerstein truly came into her own. Sitting alone onstage, cocooned in her sound, she delivered a rapt and soulful performance of this extraordinary work. Like the Bach cello suites, Kodaly's sonata uses the resources of a single instrument to conjure a complete world, in this case suffused with the harmonic, rhythmic, and expressive essence of Hungarian folk music. Weilerstein's earthy playing, rigorous yet free, brought these folk elements to the fore, and with striking clarity in the upper registers and a deep molten tone in the cello's lowest, subterranean reaches. The energy in her playing was unflagging; the stopped chords at the end of the first movement were fired off like pistol shots.
She brought a similar concentration and intensely physical delivery to Osvaldo Golijov's rhapsodic tango-infused soliloquy for solo cello called "Omaramor," and she closed the program with Barnatan returning to the stage for a jointly sensitive reading of Chopin's Cello Sonata (Op. 65). In this case, however, the Chopin sounded a bit too similar to the Beethoven, highlighting the way that Weilerstein's strong musical personality seems to flood everything she plays. In other words, she is still grappling with the paradox of how to perform with such a distinctive individual stamp while avoiding a creeping sense of sameness; how to have a strong interpretive voice while still granting the temperature, moods, colors, and sensibilities of a work their own radically independent lives.
Plenty of performers with decades more experience have not solved this particular koan of interpretation, and her program was clearly the best debut recital of the year so far. On a more fundamental level, Weilerstein seemed to implicitly answer the challenge Isaac Stern used to pose time and again to technically gifted young players: Show the audience not just how you make music but why .
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Boston Globe
Wild (at heart)
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein brings passion and intensity to her BSO debut
By Joan Anderman
Published: March 15, 2009
NEW YORK - Alisa Weilerstein is lugging her cello through the labyrinthine halls of the Juilliard School, totally lost and apologizing profusely. Her mother, pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, has just called from the practice room with bad news. Her father, violinist Donald Weilerstein, left at home in Boston Alisa's score for Janacek's "Kreutzer Sonata" - a commissioned transcription that the Weilerstein Trio will soon premiere at Carnegie Hall.
No matter. At 26, Alisa Weilerstein is a seasoned gear-shifter as well as a masterful cellist. Parents located, instrument tuned, Weilerstein toggles from testy daughter to tender interpreter to musical dervish with an astonishing mix of precision and ardor. As she plays the mercurial music from memory, strands of Weilerstein's long hair become tangled in the cello's tuning pegs and under its strings. By the finish, the floor near her feet is strewn with horsehair from her shredded bow.
"She played that better than she does with the music in front of her," Vivian marvels. To which Alisa responds: "She would never say that to my face."
Donald and Vivian Weilerstein's first clue that their girl was more musical than most came 23 years ago, with the realization that they had no need for a baby sitter. Vivian simply plopped the toddler under the piano during practice sessions, assured of peace and quiet until the music stopped, at which point Alisa would pitch the sort of fit other kids reserve for the toy store.
On Thursday Weilerstein will make her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut, performing Brahms's Double Concerto for Violin and Cello with another rising star, Janine Jansen. In the days and weeks and months after that she will continue her (nearly lifelong) journey to the most elite ranks of classical music.
A few words come up over and over again in discussions about the cellist. Yo-Yo Ma uses all of them.
"I first heard Alisa when she was an adolescent and I remember that one of my first impressions of her playing was that she is so full of passion," Ma says in an e-mail. "More recently I was struck by how fearless Alisa is. Those two qualities, in combination with a great musical intelligence, really define her artistry for me."
Sitting in her apartment on the western edge of Harlem, Weilerstein tries to recall a time in her life which for most people precedes memory, in order to describe her deep attraction to the cello. She remembers her grandmother coming to stay with her in Rochester, N.Y., where Weilerstein spent her first seven years. Donald and Vivian both had out-of-town performances and Alisa, who was 3, had the chicken pox.
"My grandmother brought a string quartet of instruments she had made out of cereal boxes, and the cello was a Rice Krispies box. She'd cut out the F-holes and made the endpin from an old toothbrush. All I know is I didn't want anything else," Weilerstein says. "My dad had quartets over to rehearse all the time and they put out a little stool for me so that I could saw away at this thing that made no sound, and that of course became frustrating. I remember saying 'Mommy, I want a cello and cello teacher.' She told me 'Oh, no. You're too young.' But I kept asking."
Weilerstein just returned from a tour of Europe where, during the final stretch, she played nine concerts in 11 days. She estimates that since moving in four months ago she's spent four weeks total in her apartment, which is sparsely furnished with a sofa, a couple of tables, a bed, and a treadmill. (Weilerstein lived in the North End for two years, but returned to New York last fall after the relationship that brought her to Boston ended.) There's a shelf of first-rate fiction (Chekhov, Cervantes, Homer, Henry Miller) and plenty of Russian history, which was Weilerstein's major at Columbia.
Already carrying a full tour schedule when she enrolled as an 18-year-old undergraduate ("I wanted to meet normal people"), Weilerstein did classwork on planes, trains, and buses, and she can tell you where to find a library in major cities around the world. On one Japanese tour Weilerstein turned in five papers via e-mail.
But the busy, unconventional lifestyle was hardly a novelty. As a student in the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music (her father was the founding first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet), Weilerstein took academic classes in the morning, studied music all afternoon, then went home to practice cello and do her homework. She was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 9, but didn't speak publicly about her condition until last year, when she became a celebrity advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
"I wanted to prove I could carry a schedule just the same as anyone else," she says. "And I totally did. That's the message I want to get across: It doesn't have to change your approach to life or what you want to do."
Indeed. Self-driven and impatient, Weilerstein debuted with the Cleveland Orchestra at age 13.
"It sounds ridiculous, even to me, but at the time I felt like I had waited my whole, long life to play with an orchestra," she says. "I felt very old and very experienced and that I was finally getting to do what I had been waiting so long to do."
Call her gifted, ambitious, virtuosic, a natural. Don't call her a prodigy.
"Mozart was called the genuine prodigy and to use that word so lightly when describing someone who's very precocious . . . I have trouble with that," says Weilerstein, who is as measured in conversation as she is fervent onstage. "And there's a stigma attached to the word. When you hear someone is a prodigy you think that person is a genius, certainly, but also an abused genius who was locked in a room for 10 hours a day. Yes, I was talented and worked extremely hard. But I had as normal a childhood as I think I could have considering the fact that I was a serious cellist, and as such something of an oddball."
Vivian Weilerstein says that Alisa played cello much the way other children would play with a favorite toy.
"She was an unusual person. Language development was late - Alisa really didn't converse like other children until she was about 5," Vivian says. "But she had cello concerti memorized."
So what is it that sets Alisa Weilerstein apart from the other naturals? Composer Osvaldo Golijov calls her "a volcanic person, a beautiful restless soul." Golijov worked closely with Weilerstein on his cello concerto "Azul," first performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the BSO three years ago at Tanglewood, and which he and Weilerstein revised for the work's New York premiere at the 2007 Mostly Mozart Festival.
"I brought in a little new music every day and one day we were playing along and after about 10 minutes I say, 'No, no. You have to do it differently,' " Golijov recalls. "But it turns out she was improvising, and I had not noticed. That's how in tune Alisa is with the musical intention. She didn't say 'I'm stopping because there's no more music.' She kept going."
Weilerstein won the genetic lottery, as did her brother Josh, a violinist and conductor studying at New England Conservatory, where both of their parents are on the faculty. But it's who she is above and beyond the music - her intensity and curiosity and sense of adventure - that distinguishes Weilerstein as an artist, and creates what one longtime instructor calls the "awe factor."
"She was a fearless little girl with a big spirit who was willing to go beyond form to play music," says Richard Weiss, a cellist in the Cleveland Orchestra and Weilerstein's teacher from age 11 to 18. Weiss says he actually worried, early on, that the young musician was too wild for her own good. "My main concern was to try to foster a technique that would protect her from physically burning out."
Weiss did his job. But the search for balance is ongoing, and finding the sweet spot where form and feel collide is "the whole thing," according to Weilerstein. "Technique is only a tool, a means to the ultimate goal of being a free and honest musician."
That's a state of grace all strive for and few achieve. Among the latter group, and the first name Weilerstein mentions when asked about her role models, is the late English cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whom Weilerstein describes in language usually associated not with notes and scores, but hearts and souls.
"There's such love there," she says of du Pré. "Such generosity."
Weilerstein talks about her own affection for the cello in similar terms: the way she embraces it, how much her instrument's warm tones resemble the human voice, its wide range of emotion. Attending to that last part is where Weilerstein's fearlessness serves her - and the music, and the listener - so well. Weilerstein throws her arms around the vast emotional expanse, ecstasy and agony alike.
Performing Penderecki's savage Second Cello Concerto last year with the New York Philharmonic, Weilerstein says, her bow began to take on characteristics of a knife, and she began to feel like a murderer. It was a state so consuming, and so hard to snap out of, she had to force herself to take her bows.
"We all have the darkness inside of us, and it's easy to be afraid to go there. But the music demands it," Weilerstein says. "So you find it."
San Francisco Chronicle
Alisa Weilerstein works against diabetes
By Joshua Kosman
Published: December 8, 2008
If you've got a cause to promote, Alisa Weilerstein is just the sort of person you want in your camp. Energetic and hyper-articulate, the 26-year-old cellist has no difficulty in saying what's on her mind, and she does it with the kind of engaging forcefulness that is hard to resist.
Ever since she began giving concerts as a child, Weilerstein has been putting those gifts in the service of composers and their work, from Camille Saint-Saëns to Osvaldo Golijov.
Now she's added a new string to her bow, as it were. As of last month, Weilerstein has been the celebrity advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, making public appearances to urge further action toward a cure and serving as the public face for the disease.
Weilerstein is a walking demonstration of how little a diagnosis of juvenile, or Type 1, diabetes needs to interfere with an active life.
"I monitor my blood sugar constantly, and I inject myself with insulin," she said during a recent visit to San Francisco, "and I never look at food without thinking about the carbo grams. But it's not the kind of thing that needs to have a big impact on your life."
It's a good thing, too, because Weilerstein's career has gotten much busier in the past two years. She's in demand by orchestras across the country and internationally - she made a strong San Francisco Symphony debut with guest conductor David Robertson in May - and she'll give her first local recital Thursday, appearing in Herbst Theatre with her frequent duo partner, pianist Inon Barnatan.
The resulting crush of activity - and the opportunities to spread the word about juvenile diabetes - seems to suit her down to the ground.
"I love the traveling. I have a friend in every part of the earth. I'm meeting people, playing with people, seeing how they work.
"It's a fascinating way of life, getting paid to do what I love. There's not many people who can say that."
Weilerstein came to music as a very young child, in the most natural way imaginable - both of her parents are professional musicians. Her father, violinist Donald Weilerstein, was a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet, and her mother is the pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein; the three have often appeared as a trio.
But Weilerstein insists there was no stage parenting in her upbringing, and certainly no pressure to go into the family business.
"I always knew I wanted to be a cellist. I pushed my parents - they didn't push me."
Her first intimation of her future, she says, came when she was 2 1/2 and her parents left her in her grandmother's care while on tour.
"She made a string quartet for me out of cereal boxes. The cello was Rice Krispies, and I gravitated right to that one. I shunned the others."
She began taking lessons at 4, but her parents insisted on keeping things low-key.
"I didn't practice very much as a kid - maybe half an hour a day of formal practice. But I spent hours banging around with the instrument like a toy - and trying to play the Dvorák and Saint-Saëns concertos by ear."
By the time she was an undergraduate at Columbia University - studying Russian literature and living across the dorm hallway from the actress Julia Stiles - Weilerstein was already performing frequently (she appeared in concert with the California Symphony at 14). And all the time, diabetes was a constant presence.
Weilerstein was diagnosed with the disease at 9, and learned to give herself her own insulin shots soon thereafter.
"That usually takes a year, but I was able to do it after two months," she says with a laugh. "I had motivation, which was that my parents were away performing at a festival, and my poor grandmother had to give me a shot.
"It was so painful, I thought, 'I can't go through this twice a day.' So I sat there with a needle and taught myself how to do it."
Being diagnosed at 9, she says, was terrifying at first, but she quickly got over it.
"When you're that age, you adapt so quickly. It's worse if you're 15, or already in college, and you have a lifestyle already carved out."
For many years, she says, she was open about the disease with friends, but kept it from everyone in the professional world - even her manager.
"The perception of diabetes is that you're on dialysis and going blind by the time you're 30, and I just decided I wanted to prove I could sustain a schedule like everyone else. I always thought that if I had a platform, I could help young people who are scared like I was.
"You have to be secure enough to deal with other people's reactions. Mostly the questions are 'What do you have to do about it?' which is fine. I don't mind that.
"But too often it's 'Oh, but aren't you afraid of amputation?' These are legitimate questions, but they're terribly insensitive." New York Magazine
Joining the Family Business
By Justin Davidson
Published: September 1, 2008
Alisa Weilerstein's parents didn't teach her the cello to complete their string trio. But it did work out that way.
Alisa Weilerstein strides through the door in high heels and a gauzy dress, and heaves her cello off her shoulder with the air of someone who would rather be wearing a sweatshirt. She's in New York for the afternoon for a benefit performance and a quick visit to the old neighborhood, which she's barely had to time to grow nostalgic about. Weilerstein graduated from Columbia four years ago and immediately hit the road. At 26, she's arguably Yo-Yo Ma's heiress apparent as sovereign of the American cello. For now, though, she is a pre-star, building her career with due deliberation. She gives her first Zankel Hall recital on December 9.
The daughter of a pianist and the longtime first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, Weilerstein was born into musical nobility. Her parents are also her chamber-music partners; they tour together as the Weilerstein Trio. "Many people assume that they put the cello in my hands because it would complete a trio, but that's not it," she says. "I begged them for a cello when I was 4. They didn't immediately discourage me by forcing me to practice seriously. It was a toy: I'd bang around on it for hours, and I taught myself the opening of the Dvorák concerto, even though I couldn't even finger the chords."
She is still making no concessions to youth. Weilerstein made her New York Philharmonic debut last January with a serenely poignant performance of Elgar's doleful Cello Concerto. Six months later, she became known to Mostly Mozart audiences with Azul, a beguiling concerto that the composer Osvaldo Golijov was still feeding to her, page by newly revised page, shortly before she walked onstage. "Two days before the concert, I was freaking out because I didn't know what I was supposed to play," she admits.
For her Zankel recital, she has chosen an intense and passionate program of Beethoven and Chopin sonatas (which she will perform with the pianist Inon Barnatan), a short piece by Golijov, and Kodaly's Sonata for solo cello. Choosing to play that last piece, in which the instrument dances, roars, and lapses into bleak soliloquies of ghostly beauty, is a tacit challenge to anyone who might think that musical insight comes only with age. "Some people will say, Oh, she couldn't possibly have the life experience to play that. Well, of course I'll play it differently in twenty years, but it would be a shame to go into a concert with a prejudice like that." W Magazine
World on a String
By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
Published: December 1, 2007
Classical music insiders have called Alisa Weilerstein many things: "immensely gifted," "a force of nature," "brilliant." Yo-Yo Ma says she is "one of the most talented cellists of her generation." But there is one accolade the 25-year-old hates: prodigy. "There is such a terrible stigma attached to that word," says the cellist. "I had a real childhood. Other kids did their extracurriculars-cello was just mine."
Truth be told, most children don't make their professional debut onstage with the Cleveland Orchestra at age 13. Nor do they take master classes with Ma (she met him when she was nine) or combine high school with study at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music.
But if music is in anyone's genes, it's in hers. Weilerstein's mother is an accomplished pianist, and her father, a violinist, was an original member of the legendary Cleveland Quartet. ("They were sort of the Beatles of classical music," she explains.) Since graduating from Columbia University in 2004, Weilerstein has become a regular at Carnegie Hall and has performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. This past summer she collaborated with composer of the moment Osvaldo Golijov at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.
"She's going to be a big star. She's got all the goods," says New York Philharmonic executive director Zarin Mehta. Onstage, the five-foot-two musician is known for creating a surprisingly big and emotional sound and delivering a physical yet technically precise performance. "She still doesn't know how to fake it," says Golijov. "She is totally in the moment and giving of herself-like a rock 'n' roller."
Her performances are, if nothing else, intense-and she can't understand how some people describe classical music as "relaxing background music." "Nothing irks me more," Weilerstein says. "I don't find it relaxing!" The New York Times
Concerto Retinkered (for Youthful Soloist)
By STEVE SMITH Published: July 31, 2007
The Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov smiled broadly as he burst into a spacious studio in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex one night last week. Greeting everyone warmly, he scanned the room for one particular person: Alisa Weilerstein, the soloist of his cello concerto, ''Azul.'' It was more than mere courtesy. ''I still have some notes to give her,'' he confided with an impish grin.
Mr. Golijov was not referring to pointers, but to actual pages of the score. Since its first performance, by Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood last summer, Mr. Golijov has thoroughly revised ''Azul.'' A little more than a week before its New York premiere, tonight at the Mostly Mozart Festival, he was still tweaking details.
Ms. Weilerstein soon arrived, and the rehearsal got under way. As Michael Ward-Bergeman squeezed out a low, steady ostinato on his hyper-accordion, a conventional acoustic instrument outfitted with electronic effects, Mr. Golijov sang rhythms to the percussionists Jamey Haddad and Cyro Baptista. Louis Langrée, the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival, filled in orchestral parts on piano.
Petite and brimming with self-assurance, Ms. Weilerstein provided a center of calm amid the din. Over percussive rumbles, shakes and splatters, she played a long, radiant melody, its melancholy reflected in her intense expressions. Mr. Golijov beamed with satisfaction.
''This is very consistent with what he's done in the past,'' Ms. Weilerstein said in an interview earlier that evening. She had become intimately acquainted with Mr. Golijov's penchant for tinkering during collaborative sessions in Boston, where they both live, and at the Banff Summer Arts Festival in Canada earlier this month. ''These pieces are living things, so that makes it very exciting,'' she added. ''I'm getting changes every single day.''
Although ''Azul'' is billed as her Mostly Mozart debut, Ms. Weilerstein, the daughter of the violinist Donald Weilerstein and the pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, first appeared at the festival two seasons ago, playing a Bach solo suite in a preconcert recital. Now a seasoned performer at 25, Ms. Weilerstein made her subscription-series debut with the New York Philharmonic in January, and played with that orchestra again in Vail, Colo., on Friday. Her season has also included appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony, and tours with the violinists Maxim Vengerov and Gil Shaham.
Ms. Weilerstein's first encounter with Mr. Golijov came in 2005, initiated by mutual friends: the clarinetist Todd Palmer and members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. She visited Mr. Golijov at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he is on the faculty, to get the scores for two chamber pieces, ''Mariel'' and ''Omaramor.''
''I was working on my Web site at the same time,'' Ms. Weilerstein said. (The address is alisaweilerstein.com.) ''He very generously suggested that I could record the video of the Kodaly solo sonata, which is on my Web site now, at Holy Cross.'' (She will play that work tonight, after the gala program, at the Kaplan Penthouse.) ''He set the whole thing up without really knowing me,'' she added. Ms. Weilerstein later sent Mr. Golijov a recording of her performance of ''Omaramor'' at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in 2006. ''He wrote to me and said he loved it,'' she said. ''A couple of months later, I found out I was doing the concerto.''
The choice of Ms. Weilerstein was initially a matter of practicality: Mr. Ma, who played ''Azul'' at Tanglewood and Ravinia, was unavailable for Mostly Mozart, and Mr. Golijov put great stock in the opinion of the St. Lawrence players and Mr. Palmer, whom he called ''my soul mates in music.''
In an interview by cellphone from a Boston-bound train a few days after the rehearsal, Mr. Golijov explained: ''I was unhappy with some of the music in the concerto. I thought, 'She's local -- we could get together every afternoon for a month and try different things.' ''
Mr. Golijov has proved unusually willing to allow his major pieces to gestate in public. At its inception, ''Azul'' was a 26-minute expansion of themes from his ''Tenebrae,'' a 2002 work that had been inspired by the Baroque composer François Couperin's devotional ''Leçons de Ténèbres.''
''Originally the piece was very, very still all the time,'' Mr. Golijov said. Mr. Ma, he had reasoned, did not require an extravaganza to demonstrate his mettle. The tone of ''Azul,'' he added, stemmed partly from his experience of listening to concerts at Tanglewood while lying on the grass, staring at the sky.
For the enclosed space of Avery Fisher Hall, Mr. Golijov reconceived ''Azul'' to reflect Ms. Weilerstein's youthful vigor and passion. He replaced the first 10 minutes and extended the cadenza. Mr. Golijov also found new inspiration in Pablo Neruda's poem ''The Heights of Macchu Picchu,'' Ms. Weilerstein said.
''In the poem there's this person that's sort of floating in the air, then he reaches into the very inside of the earth and comes out again,'' she said. ''It's that sort of emotional journey that we're trying to get through the piece. It will end similarly to the old piece, I think, but you have to earn that ending.''
Ms. Weilerstein said Mr. Golijov conveyed his ideas to her as if he were a director coaching an actor. ''He'd say, 'You play so beautifully, but you sound like you're sure of where you're going, and I don't want you to sound sure,' '' she said. ''To have somebody talk like that was so refreshing.''
The admiration was mutual. At 46, Mr. Golijov is hardly an elder statesman. Still, Ms. Weilerstein's enthusiasm proved infectious. ''It's an incredible pleasure when you're the young one,'' he said. ''But for the first time I experienced, 'Well, now I am the old one,' and it's so good to be energized by her.''
Alisa Weilerstein and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra perform ''Azul'' tonight and tomorrow night at 8 at Avery Fisher Hall, and Ms. Weilerstein also plays tonight at 10:30 at the Kaplan Penthouse, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500 or lincolncenter.org. The Philadelphia Inquirer
Cellist eager to hasten her Kimmel debut
By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - No sensible up-and-coming cellist would make an important Philadelphia Orchestra debut under Alisa Weilerstein's circumstances.
For starters, she has been shuttling between two orchestral tours - the New York Philharmonic in Japan and the Moscow State Symphony in North America. Then, she was committed to playing with Maxim Vengerov in Paris (this week) and London (next). But the few days in between those European capitals coincided with cellist Truls Mork's cancellations Friday and Saturday in Philadelphia. And though long slated to make her Kimmel Center debut in January with the visiting New York Philharmonic, Weilerstein's reaction to the Philadelphia Orchestra offer went like this: "What? Philadelphia wants me? Great! And I get to play with Eschenbach?"
Classical musicians often jet around the world with schedules as intricate as crossword puzzles. However, the 24-year-old Weilerstein lives the way she plays - in a state of intense overdrive that, this week, has her crossing so many time zones her parents consult her Web site to see where she is.
Few cellists her age have so much to draw on - as became apparent during an intense, Pepsi-fueled conversation before her Moscow State Symphony date at New Brunswick's State Theatre. The repertoire for the Friday and Saturday Philadelphia concerts is no problem. Weilerstein has been playing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 for years - for a while, it was the only thing she wanted to play - and has studied it with Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom it was written.
But what seems to drive her - aside from an ability to sleep on airplanes and an aspiration to deal with jetlag by simply resetting her watch - is the intensity of her musical imagination and her desire to share it.
Though she's often characterized as a growing-up child prodigy, Weilerstein's side of the story isn't about growing up with flashy fingers but with a simple, healthy desire, starting at age 4, to play the Dvorák Cello Concerto with full orchestra.
Now that she's doing so fairly regularly, the performances are deeply personal - or at least seem that way. In her opening Dvorák entrance, for example, she concludes with a unique tempo acceleration that makes jaws drop, even among those who barely know the piece. Where did she come up with that?
"He does say, 'Quasi improvisando,' " she says.
He? As in Dvorák? "I'm just doing what he said," she says with a gleeful laugh. "I don't want to sound self-vindicating, but the score can tell you a lot more than you think... . I read a nice quote by [composer] Ralph Vaughan Williams, that Odysseus would never have to be tied to the ship mast when the sirens were singing if they were just reading from the page."
Quite independently of the score, she conceives a piece of music employing visual imagery that she hesitates to talk about for fear of sounding trite, though that's hardly what the results are like. Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, a piece that can seem so lightweight as to induce instant amnesia, is to her a circus of tumblers and wire walkers, each in their own variation. When she plays Shostakovich on Friday, chances are she'll have, in her mind's eye, the famous photo of the depressive composer sitting alone in an empty auditorium, his bespectacled face semi-buried in his hand. It doesn't stop there: "You have to appear like you don't care, but inside you're caring horribly," she says.
Weilerstein plays the concerto's famously long cadenza like a long simmering cauldron exploding in all directions. These are the things that she has trouble explaining, except maybe to say, "It's my instinct to be extreme."
How could she be anything less, considering how she grew up? Though her father, violinist Donald Weilerstein, seems shy and eccentric to outsiders, he was first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet during its most volcanic period in the 1970s, when the American chamber-music scene reflected the painful social and political changes in the air. Her mother, pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, is known to be a firebrand as well. (The three sometimes concertize as a trio.)
"My whole upbringing, I was raised to be myself... . They were always - I wouldn't say hands-off, but they let me breathe. They really did," she says. "I was the one who asked for the cello. I was the one who told them I wanted to be serious about it. I practice with my father a few hours a day. From ages 10 or 11 until I was 16, we worked together a ton."
Growing up in Cleveland, she worked with the Cleveland Orchestra's cellist, Richard Weiss, and later with the legendary pedagogue Dorothy DeLay, whose lessons were not easily described. "I learned most from her vibration. Not the words. She was incredibly encouraging, very kind, and said very little. I walked out of every lesson feeling great."
The danger of Weilerstein's near-constant state of mobilization is losing her intuitional relationships with the surrounding world. But she still plays with her parents (and rehearsals can be ruthlessly direct). Her personal life recently stabilized, with a move to Boston to live with her longtime violinist boyfriend. Most important, she judges the success of any given concert not by conventional standards but by its "vibration."
"It's when I feel really inside the music and there's no outside circumstance that's hindering that. It's when there's feedback coming back at you, and not necessarily with applause. It's always a dialogue, even if the other persons are silent. I'm grateful for any audience at all, but it's extra-special when you feel like they're really engaged. And it inspires me to do better."
Strings Magazine:
The Graduate:
Cello wunderkind Alisa Weilerstein prepares to enter the real world
By David Templeton, May, 2004
For 22 year old musician Alisa Weilerstein, enormous changes are looming ahead. When her current school year comes to an end, the virtuoso cellist--she's been playing since she was four--will be graduating from Columbia University and stepping out into the world. While this will certainly mean that new opportunities are opening up, Weilerstein realizes now, with a twinge of sadness, that a major chapter of her life will have come to a close.
"I've loved being in school," she says. "I still love it! My classes are fantastic. It's always so amazing to be surrounded by interesting people from around the world, to participate in these incredible literary discussions, to meet brilliant people who've had unbelievable experiences. It's been wonderful--and I'll miss everything about it.
"Well," she adds, with a laugh. "I probably won't miss the exams."
Weilerstein, who cut her debut album, Cello Recital, four years ago, has been in constant demand as a soloist and chamber player throughout her college years. Along the way, she has won piles of awards, including the Avery Fisher Career Grant--while appearing with the San Francisco Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and numerous others, and becoming known for her impassioned playing, precision, and energetic physical presence. Weilerstein's parents, Donald and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, [who play the violin and piano, respectively], are accomplished musicians as well. The family sometimes performs together as the Weilerstein Trio.
While at Columbia, Alisa has packed her school vacations with tours and appearances, managing to find time during the academic year for exactly 50 concerts. "That's the absolute maximum I can do and still graduate on time," she says.
None of it has been easy, balancing life as a full-time student with her emerging career as a musician, but Weilerstein--who pays a 1790 Forster cello, made in England--has somehow learned to make it all work. "If Columbia has taught me anything, it's taught me how to practice efficiently," she explains. "I can get done in an hour, now, what used to take me five. It's about setting priorities, and becoming streamlined in my habits. Also, I think it's about making sure that I love what I'm doing, that everything I spend time on is really worth the effort. Otherwise, it's just toil for no reason."
Weilerstein opted to forgo the conservatory route chosen by many of her contemporaries. She's a history major, with a concentration on Eastern Europe and Russia in the 20th century. As she explains it, she would have majored in Russian literature, but that's an especially strict course, which would have required her to study Russian every day. Her demanding performance schedule ruled that out.
Still, she says Russian history has been a satisfying course of study.
"I have a very strong interest in Soviet history," she says, "partly because my ancestors came from that part of the world, and partly because Shostakovich and Prokofiev are two of my favorite composers." An avid reader, she names Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite book.
After graduation this month, Weilerstein plans to stay in New York. Once she's free from her busy academic schedule, she plans to increase substantially the number of her yearly performances. "I'm actually really looking forward to not having to turn any concerts down," she admits. "I want to see what it's like to be a full-time musician. And being able to practice completely, as much as I want to every day, that's something I'm really looking forward to. "
Asked to give some advice for other young musicians balancing academia and music, she is precise and to the point. "Stay really, really focused on what you want," she says.
With a laugh, she adds, "And learn to get by on very little sleep."
New York Times
A Natural Comes of Age: (All of 18)
By Matthew Gurewitsch, January 28, 2001
"HER father, at the time the first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, was on tour in Europe. Her mother, a pianist, had her own concert dates on the road. So it was most inconvenient of Alisa Weilerstein, at 2, to develop chickenpox. Thank heaven for the grandmother who hastened from Albany to Rochester, bearing a handmade set of toy string instruments: two violins, viola and cello.
The cello, a painted Rice Krispies box with a toothbrush for the end pin, was the one Alisa liked most. When her parents returned, she played along with their rehearsals on grandmother's cello. At 4, she began to clamor for a cello that would produce sound. It took several months for her parents to cave in. Her first instrument was a diminutive one-sixteenth size. ''You can imagine how nasal it sounded,'' Ms. Weilerstein says now, at 18..."
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