Is it to be an interpreter? With her multi-season new project, FRAGMENTS, Weilerstein aims to rethink the concert experience and broaden the tent for classical music. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned. People might assume that a talent like yours must have been fostered at the expense of everything else. With contemporary music, theres so much context put around it even before weve heard anything.. I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.. Gerardo Antonio Sanchez Torres/courtesy of the artist, Alisa Weilerstein Plays Elgar: Exploring Music With An Intense Past, Young Cellist With An Old Soul Plays Elgar, Elliott Carter, Alisa Weilerstein: Playing Bach With The Fishes, Around The Classical Internet: September 23, 2011, Cellist Alisa Weilerstein Among MacArthur Grant Winners, Alisa Weilerstein: From Bach To The Backstreets Of Buenos Aires, Band Of Gypsies: Haydn And Brahms At Spoleto Festival, Alisa Weilerstein: The Art Of Chopin's Cello. They have one child. How do you nourish your creative life when youre not working? Then you come back to it with a new and fresh perspective. Alisa Weilerstein 2023 Orchestre symphonique de Montral. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein, explaining her decision to retract an earlier promise not to play the pieces until she was older, says that the suites "present the player with infinite possibilities." Known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment and rare interpretive depth, she was recognized with a He was Dad (laughs). For anyone in the classical music world, being able to expose other people to these great works is always something you hope to do. You try to treat the score as something thats living and breathing, and therefore, malleable. Today her career is truly global in scope, taking her to the most prestigious international venues for solo recitals, chamber concerts and concerto collaborations with all the preeminent conductors and orchestras worldwide. Among these cookies, cookies classified as necessary are stored on your browser because they are essential for the functioning of the basic functionality of the website. Alisa Weilerstein So you budget accordingly. Shes the same manager I have now, 20 years later. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein has announced on her Facebook page that she and her husband, the conductor Rafael Payare, are expecting their first child together. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Veterans Pension Benefits (Aid & Attendance). Im always juggling a lot of repertoire at the same time, which requires a lot of rehearsal. I think its a fantastic resource, and he writes so beautifully. This is important for any musician. Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan House Her discography also includes chart-topping albums and the winner ofBBC Musics Recording of the Year award. Thats the beauty of it. She is an ardent champion of contemporary music, and has premiered and championed important new works by composers including Pascal Dusapin, Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher. Alisa Weilerstein - Wikipedia Something I return to every so often is Kunderas The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Its familiar, theres such a child-like purity to it, says Weilerstein. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein. I havent played the Elgar in a long time. Her brother is also a conductor and violinist. Since Alisa Weilerstein was just 6, the three have performed together around the globe as the Weilerstein Trio. In fact, I played for Zara Nelsova when I was much younger, but I wasn't officially a student, I was around maybe 6 or 7 when I had my first lessons with her. So to return to it was actually really wonderful, because I found all sorts of new things in it. Her passionate performance of Chopin's Cello Sonata at WGBH is the sign of a young musician well on her way to a major career. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein plays Bach and Golijov at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Its a balance we have to strive forto protect what the composer intended, yet keep the music alive so it doesnt become a museum piece, or simply an archive. Alisa Weilerstein: Fragments | Apr 1, 2023 in NYC | Carnegie Hall So Fragments is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly pass genre of response programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. However, even with a very specific composer like that, there is tremendous room for interpretation. Theres a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and its important to preserve those things, Weilerstein said. Do it for no other reason than that you love it and cant imagine doing anything else. hide caption. It gives you a totally new tool. I am traveling almost all the time. March 24, 2023 When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle, Pulitzer said. Concert evenings: noon to 8 p.m. Fragments is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.. Since Alisa Weilerstein was just 6, the three have performed together around the globe as the Weilerstein Trio. Its a balance we have to strive forto protect what the composer intended, yet keep the music alive so it doesnt become a museum piece, or simply an archive. Theres this idea that we have a literal script in front of us. An authority on Bachs music for unaccompanied cello, Weilerstein recently released a best-selling recording of his solo suites on the Pentatone label, streamed them in her innovative #36DaysOfBach project, and deconstructed his beloved G-major prelude in a Vox.com video, viewed almost 1.5 million times. From Astro to Wadada Leo Smith, Fiona Apple to Frank Ocean, here are 50 albums that made 2012 great. Most classical musicians regard his work as sacred in terms of really abiding by exactly what he wrote, in terms of dynamic markings and tempi and that sort of thing. Youre playing these well-known, exacting pieces of music. Business. I never liked that word. Jamie Jung/Courtesy of the artist Ive found that my happiest collaborations with conductors, where Im playing a concerto with them, have been times where you come together from very, very different places. Alisa Weilerstein | The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center In general, Weilerstein's approach is deliberate and detailed, more reminiscent of Mstislav Rostropovich than of the members of her own family with whom she plays chamber music. The goal is always to know these scores better, to truly, The Creative Independent is ad-free and published by, Master Class (esk filharmonie / Czech Philharmonic), Rachmaninovs Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. Luckily, I didnt ever have that fear. She has been married to Rafael Payare since 2013. hide caption. For example, as recently as November, Weilerstein still planned to perform the complete Bach suites for cello in Santa Barbara in April of 2021. I came to Aspen, I think, for 16 summers of my first 18 years of life, so I spent a lot of my formative years here, so it really feels like another home to me. You have to have a willingness to collaborate. September 23, 2011 A "genius" cellist, more protesting letters from London, Iraqi musicians go to Germany, and dreams of "comfort sounds" series: All the news that's fit to link. 1 888 842-9951. Some did, she said, and some very much did not.. Anyone can read what you share. But for this upcoming performance, itll be my first time that I play it without a conductor, so it should be interesting. AW: I was 13 when I first came as a student, so that was 1995, and I studied with David Finckel, and also, I played for Dorothy DeLay quite a lot. WebAlisa Weilerstein. This means people can now refer to you as a genius in an official capacity. Alisa Weilerstein is an American classical cellist who began performing professionally at the age of 13. You try to treat the score as something thats living and breathing, and therefore, malleable. You also have to deal with the traveling, which is very tough on the body. She lives with her husband, Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, and their two young children. For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of Fragments, beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music. In Alisa Weilersteins groundbreaking, multi-year performance series FRAGMENTS, new music by some of the most compelling composers of our time meets The other goal that I have is to try to help create a twenty-first century repertoire for the cello, much in the way that Rostropovich did in the twentieth century. Its tricky, especially if its a composer like Beethoven, who was specific about what he wanted. Lucio Lecce/courtesy of the artist Her Sarabandes are extraordinary, very slow (a lot of the high time total is racked up here) without being emotionally overwrought: they are deeply meditative. Ive been looking forward to working with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra because they dont play like a typical orchestra with a conductor at the head, in which case you just follow the conductors beat. Alisa Weilerstein is an American cellist who started playing the cello at a young age. WebAlisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. I have actually recorded the Elgar with Daniel Barenboim. Im still going to always try to improve as an artist and to be a more insightful interpreter. Weilerstein and Jason Yoder ( marimba) perform Camille Saint-Sans 's "Le cygne" (The Swan) from The Carnival of the Animals at the White House Evening of Classical Music (November 2009) Problems playing these files? See media help. Alisa Weilerstein (born April 14, 1982) is an American classical cellist. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. [1] Jamie Jung My parents were very conscious to give me as close to a normal childhood as possible, so I had friends, played outside, went to normal school. But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.. Alisa Weilerstein - IMDb February 16, 2012 Positioned above a tank full of stingrays at the National Aquarium, Weilerstein used her cello to serenade sea creatures (and many pleasantly surprised visitors) with music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Alisa Weilersteins new project, Fragments, comes to Zankel Hall on April 1. FC: So you were just an infant-in-arms for a while, and you started playing cello when you were four. Do you even remember the first time you were here? 15 Of The Greatest And Most Famous Cello Players Of All Time The Law Office of Gretchen J. Kenney assists clients with Elder Law, including Long-Term Care Planning for Medi-Cal and Veterans Pension (Aid & Attendance) Benefits, Estate Planning, Probate, Trust Administration, and Conservatorships in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because its hard enough, even when you love it. Adagio (Con gran espressione) 12:35 3. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music.