Alisa Weilerstein started playing cello at age four and made her professional debut at age 13. That concert reached into the canon – she played Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with the Cleveland Orchestra – but for about as long as she’s been performing, she’s been interested in presenting new works and in working to ensure that her instrument keeps contemporary with the times.
“It was always in my mind, as long as I can remember,” she says. “I always looked at [Mstislav] Rostropovich as the great inspiration for cellists. He premiered hundreds of works in his life. He had an insatiable curiosity and a desire to expand the repertoire. It’s our duty to take up the torch and build a cello repertoire for the 21st century”.
True to that mission, Weilerstein has premiered new works by Lera Auerbach, Pascal Dusapin, Osvaldo Golijov, Matthias Pintscher and Joan Tower, among others. This season, she is premiering works by Richard Blackford, Thomas Larcher and Gabriela Ortiz. She has also commissioned 27 new solo works, or pieces of works, responding to Bach’s cello suites for her ongoing “Fragments” project, the remainder of which will see their premieres this year.
But Weilerstein is equally at home with the canon, or even perhaps the little-known canon. In a recital reviewed at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last spring, Weilerstein played Tower and Bach as well as Kodály’s Sonata for solo cello, Op.8. It was a program bold both in conceptualization and execution, full of drama and hyperdrive. Weilerstein does not shy away from grand gestures.
Such sweeping programming continues in her current season. Weilerstein will give the premiere of Blackford’s Cello Concerto on 5th–7th February with Tomáš Netopil and the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum Prague, on a program that also includes Debussy’s La Mer and the premiere performance of Jiří Teml’s The Labyrinth of Memory, a symphonic picture.
Blackford wrote the piece in response to the tumult of the year 2020, the pandemic, the killing by police of George Floyd and “the state of American politics”, according to Weilerstein, who originally hails from upstate New York. But the piece isn’t all doom. Blackford was also inspired by a story about the town of Paradise, California, where citizens worked together to rebuild homes that were destroyed in a rash of wildfires. It has “a kind of hopeful ending”, she says. “I just hope he’s right. I wonder what he would write now in 2024”.
Blackford is a student of Hans Werner Henze, another composer not averse to situating music in political contexts. Blackford’s collaboration with Maya Angelou in the late 1980s produced King, a musical adapting the life of Martin Luther King Jr. His 2001 choral-orchestral cantata Voices of Exile set a wide variety of texts from around the world – including Bosnia, Kurdistan and Somalia – reflecting the experiences of exiled and refugee writers.
But, like Henze, alongside vocal and choral pieces Blackford is also a frequent composer of instrumental works, such as this new concerto for Weilerstein. Musically, she says, the piece “transcends any sort of genre. It’s just absolute music, it’s very pure. It’s a perfect marriage of emotional and intellectual.” This latest appearance with the Czech Philharmonic builds on an ongoing relationship with the orchestra, which included a warm collaboration with former chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek, with whom Weilerstein recorded Dvořák’s Cello Concerto.
Weilerstein also talks about her collaboration with Austrian composer Thomas Larcher, whose new cello concerto she premieres in the spring. She first worked with Larcher when she was preparing his earlier concerto Ouroboros, which she performed with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in January 2020. With the solo cello as lynchpin, the rhythmically complex piece is a challenge to orchestras, and it also includes an extended cadenza for the cellist.
“Ouroboros is a fantastic piece”, she says. “I got to know him quite well doing our work on that and I just blurted out, ‘Would you be willing to do a longer cello piece?’”
That new work will first be heard 3rd–5th April with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. Weilerstein was learning the piece at the time of our conversation and was hesitant to reveal too much about the still-unnamed composition.
This year will also see Weilerstein completing the premieres of her “Fragments” cycle, a six-part project revolving around the Bach cello suites which she plans to tour through 2030.
Weilerstein has commissioned 27 composers, asking each to provide her with ten minutes of music for solo cello in two or three fragments which would be interspersed within the 36 movements of Bach’s six cello suites. She then created six expanded suites, using the submissions to build from the originals. Each set is played attacca as a unified whole and each has complementary lighting and costume tailored for the project.
“I created six programs and I chose what fits together, so in that respect I’m much more involved in what the audience experiences”, she says. “I asked everyone to do the same thing and I was very upfront with them about how I was going to approach their work. What came back was just so fascinating. Each program is a very different world”.
Three of the expanded suites have been premiered since 2022 and the other three will be heard this year, with the entire cycle to be presented at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, this summer.
In addition to the drive to present and create new work, there is another force which has shaped Weilerstein’s life since childhood and into adulthood. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age nine, a condition that demands a lifetime of monitoring and care and which would eventually become a cause for advocacy. “I don’t know life without it”, she says.
Weilerstein had family support in both career aspirations and health conditions. Coming from a family of musicians, she made her stage debut at 13 and enlisted professional representation at 14. She didn’t tell her manager about her diabetes for another three years, however. She kept the secret, she says, out of fear of judgment.
“I felt like, instead of saying anything about it, let me prove that I can carry on a very active schedule like anyone else”, she explains. Speaking publicly about the condition, however, wouldn’t come for a while yet. “I waited a little bit longer. I wanted the public to know it wasn’t affecting my ability to have a career”.
At 26, Weilerstein started working with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and has been named a celebrity ambassador for the organization. Her interest with the nonprofit organization is in letting children with diabetes and their parents know that the disease is something they can learn to live with. She also preaches the JDRF gospel that “insulin is not a cure”, and that funding research is still critical.
“It’s obviously not something anyone wants”, she says, “but with the right care the child is going to live a very happy and active life.”
Diabetes didn’t prevent Weilerstein from achieving career success and it hasn’t prevented her from starting a family of her own, either. In 2013, she married the Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, and together they have two daughters.
“I have two beautiful, healthy children”, she says. “Pregnancy with diabetes is no joke, but I got through it.”
In a sense, the condition may have even contributed to the rigor she needed to be a concert musician and soloist.
“It gives you a general discipline to your whole life if you have to deal with that as a child”.
Alisa Weilerstein premieres Richard Blackford’s new Cello Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic and Tomáš Netopil on 5th–7th February at the Rudolfinum, Prague.
Weilerstein returns to perform with the Czech Philharmonic on 1st July at Litomyšl and 5th July at Bad Kissingen.
This article was sponsored by the Czech Philharmonic.
