The cellos are coming! This summer’s BBC Proms, announced yesterday, will feature no fewer than ten cello concertos, as well as a chamber music concert for multiple cellos. An article about the cello invasion in the new Proms booklet is headlined “No more second fiddle”, which is slightly bizarre — but we know what it means. Alisa Weilerstein certainly does. “Whenever I tell people I play the cello, they always say. ‘Oh, it’s my favourite instrument’,” she says. “Yet most orchestras will programme a maximum of two cello concertos a year — far fewer than violin concertos. And piano concertos are more
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WQXR: The Best New Classical Releases of August 2018
Transfigured Night
“Schoenberg’s music is put into even starker relief on Transfigured Night, a collaboration between cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the Trondheim Soloists, a Norwegian chamber orchestra… Even by Haydn’s sunny standards, his two cello concertos effuse a particular joie de vivre, sharpened by Weilerstein’s bright tone and brisk tempos. From heights this high, it’s difficult to prepare for a drop as precipitous as Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht… Schoenberg’s setting is accordingly grim, but Weilerstein and the Trondheim Soloists work hard to pad the blow, rewarding with finely-calibrated dynamics and resonant ensemble playing.”
Transfigured Night – Haydn and Schoenberg CD review – captures each shift of colour
Transfigured Night
“The disc cements the ongoing partnership between Weilerstein and the Trondheim Soloists, an orchestra of around two dozen mostly twentysomethings. It’s a cliche to talk of such a young orchestra offering youthful exuberance, but let’s do it anyway – their playing has a buoyancy and energy that in the Haydn form the ideal springboard for Weilerstein’s playing as it leaps and dances in and out of the larger texture. The finales are so fast as to be at times a bit of a scramble, but Weilerstein’s tone rings easily when she wants a melody to sing out. The orchestra is an equal partner, setting up a mood of understated tenderness in the slow movements.”
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein on Latest Album, Trondheim Soloists & Bach’s Cello Suites
Transfigured Night
Alisa Weilerstein’s first album for Pentatone—brilliant performances of Haydn’s two cello concertos with an appropriately starry-eyed recording of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht—marks the first recorded fruit of her new multi-season role as artistic partner of Norway’s celebrated Trondheim Soloists. The Haydn concertos alone make this essential listening: Both in command of thrills and a genuine understanding of what Haydn in the 21st century can be if it is spontaneous and free, her performances of the two concertos are without equal in the catalogue.
Alisa Weilerstein signs to Pentatone
Cellist to begin partnership with Haydn and Schoenberg
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein has signed to the Pentatone label. The first release under the partnership, due later this year, will pair the First and Second Haydn Cello Concertos with Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The American cellist will be performing with the Trondheim Soloists, the Norwegian chamber ensemble with which she is Artistic Partner.
How cellist Alisa Weilerstein found her passion
How cellist Alisa Weilerstein found her passion
“Alisa Weilerstein did not get her start in La Jolla, but it was an early and pivotal step on her musical path. The acclaimed cellist, who will perform at the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest on Wednesday, was 4 years old at the time.
‘My parents are musicians, and they were performing at SummerFest in 1986,’ she recalled. ‘We were staying at the house of Chris and Sue Fan, who helped sponsor the festival. They are also the parents of cellist Felix Fan. I listened to him play, and — a little later on — I asked my (pianist) mother for a cello. I started lessons shortly after that. ‘I had no interest in exploring any other instrument. It was a very strong and deep instinct.'”
For cellist Alisa Weilerstein, it’s all about balance and connection
“Though her playing sounds flawless to listeners, acclaimed cellist Alisa Weilerstein doesn’t strive for perfection in her performances.
‘I don’t think perfection really exists. It only exists is a very rudimentary sense, to say, “OK, you’ve played every note right.” But for what?’ Weilerstein laughs. ‘It doesn’t mean anything … To be connected intellectually, as well as emotionally — that’s what you strive for. For me, it’s always been about trying to achieve an intellectual and emotional balance. I’m going to be working on that my whole life.’”
Interview: Alisa Weilerstein on what it means to be a classical musician
“There is no end point. I’m still going to always try to improve as an artist and to be a more insightful interpreter. The goal is always to know these scores better, to truly live with the great masterworks—like the Bach Suites, for example. To keep growing with them.”
‘It Demands Everything of You’: Alisa Weilerstein on Bach
“Think of a cellist performing all six of Bach’s solo cello suites in a single concert as akin to a mountaineer’s climbing Everest: In itself, it has become a regular thing, but the achievement, not to mention the courage it requires, still has a special status.
Alisa Weilerstein is new to the summit this season, and she brings her Bach to the 92nd Street Y on Saturday. Just after a premiere performance of a new Matthias Pintscher concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra last month, she talked through a favorite page of the suites, choosing the second half of the Prelude to Suite No. 4 — a twisting, shape-shifting route from a cadenza back to the E flat of the prelude’s opening.”
5 of Alisa Weilerstein’s Favorite New Works for Cello
“I’m a cellist, therefore I don’t have the luxury of ‘favorite’ repertoire,” Alisa Weilerstein said after rehearsing a concerto, Outscape, by Pascal Dusapin, which had its world-premiere performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday, May 26, 2016. “I love the standard repertoire very much, but it’s limited, especially if you compare it the violin or the piano.”
Weilerstein is committed to expanding the repertoire by developing relationships with living composers. “I try to take Rostropovich’s example, who had incredible relationships with composers and of course was the muse to Shostakovich and Prokofiev,” she said. “Without him, we might not have these titanic 20th century cello works. Cellists of my generation need to give back and forge relationships with the composers of today to create a strong 21st-century repertoire. It’s not only out of a sense of duty, but I genuinely enjoy working with composers and being a part of the creative process.”
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein Talks Travel and Her Repertoire
Alisa Weilerstein always knew that she wanted to be a cellist. For reasons she can’t explain, she was instantly attracted to the instrument as a small child. Her grandmother made her a series of instruments from cereal boxes when she had chicken pox; she was drawn to the Rice Krispies cello. She graduated to the real thing at the age of four.
Alisa Weilerstein: From cereal boxes to cello achievement
Sensitive and emotional performances are the hallmark of Alisa Weilerstein, the 32-year-old cellist whom San Francisco Performances presents this weekend at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco. The recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2001 and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, she has become a champion of contemporary music — as comfortable interpreting contemporary works by Osvaldo Golijov as she is playing Bach.
US cellist Alisa Weilerstein brings Dvorak to the Proms
The Dvorak Cello Concerto is one of the most performed, and most recorded pieces for the instrument. Since its premiere in 1896, it has drawn some of the world’s greatest instrumentalists into its orbit. So what gives this work its enduring appeal? Ahead of her performance of the Dvorak at the Proms on 24 August, US cellist Alisa Weilerstein explains the concerto’s continuing attraction.
WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein is widely recognized as one of the great classical musicians of her generation, and in 2011 she received a MacArthur “genius” grant. She discusses performing on June 6 at the New York Philharmonic’s Biennial, the orchestra’s contemporary music festival, where she will give the NY premiere of Mattias Pintscher’s Reflections on Narcissus.
A Matter of Interpretation
American cellist Alisa Weilerstein, a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship in 2011 who enjoys a prominent international career, employs these approaches and more. She once became so engrossed in playing Krzysztof Penderecki’s second cello concerto that she needed five minutes of solitude backstage before greeting admirers.
Alisa Weilerstein: Taking it to the bridge
The recording, like the 30-year-old American cellist, is supercharged with virtues that speak to the better part of human nature. Weilerstein’s take on two concertos – one a warhorse, the other little known outside the walls of the modernist music ghetto – found instant five-star favour with reviewers. Her reading of Elgar’s Cello Concerto has already been ranked alongside Jacqueline du Pré’s legendary recording of the work almost half a century ago, the benchmark by which all others have been measured, and usually found wanting. Weilerstein also set down a strong marker for new music’s cause by pairing Elgar with Elliot Carter’s Cello Concerto, completed just before his 92nd birthday in 2000.
Alisa Weilerstein talks about recording Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Daniel Barenboim
“I felt so lucky to be playing with them. Their quality of sound, flexibility, and connection emotionally, musically and structurally has everything you could want. This orchestra has worked with Barenboim for 20 years, and of course rehearsing in this very rigorous and detailed way, you really get to know the players and the psychology behind everything. Barenboim was equally demanding of them as he was of me, really focusing on bringing out the different voices. We went deeper each day so that by the time we got to the final concert, we could be totally immersed and not have to think about annoying technical issues. That was the most gratifying part. It gave us freedom to really let go.”
Alisa Weilerstein Plays Elgar: Exploring Music With An Intense Past
British composer Edward Elgar wrote his cello concerto in 1919 — soon after the end of World War I — and it’s suffused with the dark weight of that war. All Things Considered host Melissa Block sat down with 30-year-old American cellist Alisa Weilerstein to listen to Weilerstein’s new recording of the piece, which she made with the Berlin Staatskapelle and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
Cello virtuoso Alisa Weilerstein is always at the head of her class
Alisa Weilerstein is used to leading a double life. As an accelerated high school student, she was already a concertizing cellist who lugged her unwieldy instrument on and off trains and planes. As a Columbia University undergrad she wrote philosophy papers while airborne, traveling from one performance venue to another. But make that a triple life. The 28-year-old New Yorker, growing toward a stellar career, is also diabetic and has been since age 9 — all of which makes her over-achievement understandably remarkable.