Weilerstein, Alisa

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    Review: ‘Fragments’ Proposes a New Kind of Cello Recital

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    Alisa Weilerstein brought her new project, a mix tape of new works and movements from Bach’s cello suites, to Zankel Hall.Alisa Weilerstein, a cellist of explosive emotional energy, gave the New York premiere of her new project, “Fragments,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. I was there, but she wouldn’t want me to tell you exactly what happened.Journalists have been asked to include a spoiler alert if they plan to reveal the concert’s program — which I will do, so consider yourself warned.“Fragments” is a new, multiyear series in which Weilerstein plans to pair each of Bach’s six cello suites with new works she commissioned for the project in general, but not for any suite in particular.Weilerstein and her director, Elkhanah Pulitzer, are aiming to rethink how artists connect with their audiences by reconfiguring the traditional concert format, which they feel has gotten, if not quite stale, predictable. An element of surprise — and the abandonment of preconceived notions — is critical to their concept.Gone are the usual program notes, intermission, encores and set lists. On Saturday, an evening built around Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G, ushers handed out playbills that listed composers’ names but not their biographies, inspirations or influences. Left out, as well, were the pieces’ titles and the order in which they would be played.In fact, whole works would be broken up, scrambled out of order and integrated with the other pieces. The purpose, Weilerstein told The New York Times recently, came from a desire to foster “an appreciation for being in one communal space.” In that sense, the format was a success: Audience members, untethered from any explanation that could ground them, focused intently on Weilerstein and the kaleidoscope of sound emanating from the stage.The program wasn’t entirely random. Weilerstein’s unconventional means yielded a conventional arc, with a gradual start, fiery middle and contemplative end. The first selection came from Joan Tower, who contributed a single, unified, untitled piece instead of a work that could be split up and dispersed across the program: A long-held note, something of an invitation, gave way to harmony-driven momentum. The first movement of Reinaldo Moya’s “Guayoyo Sketches,” a tribute to Venezuelan coffee culture, came next. Its dusty pizzicato tremolo had the predawn rustle of someone waking up and shuffling to the kitchen to prepare the morning’s brew before the household had awakened. Without a title or program notes, though, a listener couldn’t so easily have connected Moya’s evocation with any personal experience.At times the concert felt like a TikTok-ified recital: a stream of strongly linked bits of content, broken down into parts and divorced from their original context, that came and went in brief, entertaining flashes without pause or time for reflection.Weilerstein sat on a powder-blue stool in the middle of the stage surrounded by 13 blocks resembling variously sized portions of a wall with picture molding. The scenic designer, Seth Reiser, made Weilerstein a room of her own by breaking down a wall and reassembling the scattered pieces into a circular shape that, in its own way, felt complete — fragments forming a new whole.The most compelling stretch of music came toward the end, when Weilerstein used the private wistfulness of the Bach suite’s Gigue — a quality that plenty of other players have found in it — to pivot toward a sequence of introspective pieces. The broad opening chords of Gili Schwarzman’s “Preludium” — a stand-alone piece like Tower’s — found strength in patience, and Bach’s Sarabande, already the suite’s most pensive music, felt utterly transformed in its murmuring solitude. Wrapping up the section, the ghostly harmonics of the second movement of Allison Loggins-Hull’s “Chasing Balance” and the whispered echoes of Chen Yi’s “Mountain Tune” seemed to emerge from the distant place of the Sarabande.It all was a tour de force, but those Bach movements took on a scratchy tone, coming as they did after the furious, screeching assertiveness of the third movement of Loggins-Hull’s piece and the bumblebee flight of Yi’s “Spin Dance.” And when Bach’s bouncy Courante followed that section’s extended contemplations, it sounded a little slick — a puzzle piece that had been smoothed out to fit a place where it didn’t belong.Each composer was assigned a specific color in Reiser’s lighting design, and that one bit of signposting flooded the walls as Weilerstein played — teal for Loggins-Hull, red-orange for Moya, a palate-cleansing white for Bach, and so on.But with so much randomness and manufactured confusion, I wonder whether future installments in the “Fragments” series would benefit from yet a different structure. Perhaps each Bach movement could introduce a whole work by a single composer, to give its ideas room to breathe.The program’s final piece, a greatest hit saved for last, was Bach’s Prelude, the suite’s first movement. It felt as though the preceding 60 minutes had been building to this pure, epiphanic point, turning an ending into another beginning.As concertgoers left Zankel, they were handed a set list so that they could piece together what they had seen and heard. But the catharsis of the Prelude, the comfort of its familiarity, rendered in a beautifully slender tone, made any explanation unnecessary.FragmentsPerformed on Saturday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

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      Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.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 musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “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.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé 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. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“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.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. 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. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “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.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“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. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”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.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Guest Challenges Common Wisdom

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      The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann surrounded a showcase for cellist Alisa Weilerstein with idiosyncratic readings of repertory staples.The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann, who made a hotly anticipated debut with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday, has had a skyrocketing career. Most notably, she started this season as the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — making her, regrettably, the lone female conductor among the 25 largest American orchestras. Women comprise about half of all orchestral players nationally and even outnumber men in the playing ranks of the Philharmonic.Many orchestra musicians reportedly love Stutzmann — who first made her name as a contralto and has recorded as a singer — for her deeply felt opinions and direct communication style. At the Philharmonic, she laid out her bona fides by beginning her program with Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” overture. (She will be making her debut at the Bayreuth Festival in August with this opera, so Wednesday’s performance felt like a bit of a preview.) She led it with a singer’s innate sense of phrasing and generous expanse; the orchestra seemed happy to luxuriate with her across every small hill and valley of the score.The most arresting work on the program was Prokofiev’s sprawling Sinfonia Concertante, a piece of constantly shifting moods that demands only the most virtuosic of soloists: It’s considered one of the most technically challenging, and exhausting, works written for cello.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Fosse Dancers: The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical is, aptly, its dancers. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The Sinfonia Concertante has never quite found a home in the repertory, though Prokofiev revised it extensively for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich. Before Wednesday, it had not been performed by the Philharmonic in two decades; the last time was with Rostropovich at the podium.But the piece has a profound champion in Alisa Weilerstein, the soloist this week. She is an artist who adroitly channels fierce work with her penetrating, brilliant sound — her performances of works by Kodaly and Shostakovich provide ample proof — and she made a compelling case for the Prokofiev. She dispatched every technical test with astonishing ease and visceral joy, and took obvious pleasure in the music’s often sardonic humor.It wasn’t such an easy match for Stutzmann, however, who emphasized pleasant piquancy over pointed commentary, and carefully burnished the work’s rough-hewn edges. The final movement has plenty of snarl and grit, and ends with a triumphant chord that is more frequently interpreted as thumb-your-nose sneering than exultant exclamation; instead, Stutzmann had the Philharmonic musicians land on it as delicately as a troupe of ballerinas.The orchestra was on more familiar terrain in Dvorak’s “New World”; this is, after all, the orchestra that premiered the extremely familiar work. And Stutzmann was a charming guide. She slowed down to let the audience appreciate minute, inner-voice details that they may well have otherwise missed, but she also hustled by some cherished landmark melodies. At other points, she took an overly literal interpretation of the score. I don’t recall ever hearing such a foursquare interpretation of the Largo theme, a tune meant to evoke Black spirituals that became more familiar as the melody of “Goin’ Home.”Stutzmann’s idiosyncrasies occasionally veered close to affectations. Who knew that the string chords that punctuate the brasses’ introduction to the theme at the beginning of the fourth movement were more important than the theme itself? On the other hand, Stutzmann is a conductor who certainly knows how to challenge common wisdom, making for an intensely absorbing evening.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      San Diego Gets Its Answer to the Hollywood Bowl, Just in Time

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      The dazzling new $85 million Rady Shell was intended as a summer home for the San Diego Symphony. But with the coronavirus still spreading, the orchestra plans to stay through the fall.SAN DIEGO — The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, a billowing white sail of an outdoor concert hall along the San Diego Bay, was planned as this city’s answer to the Hollywood Bowl: an $85 million summertime stage for the San Diego Symphony, a project of such architectural and acoustical distinction that it would distinguish San Diego on any national cultural map.But now, its arrival — it opened with a sold-out gala performance Friday night — has turned out to be welcome for an additional reason. With the stop-and-start coursing of the Covid pandemic, the symphony, finally playing before a full audience again, is planning to extend its stay in its new summer home at least through November. It won’t be returning to its regular venue, the downtown Copley Symphony Hall, for a while.“It was planned before Covid, but became prescient with the timing,” said Martha A. Gilmer, the chief executive of the symphony. “We just decided we’re going to stay outside and do the fall concerts outdoors.”And that it did on Friday, inaugurating this new chapter for the state’s oldest symphony with a burst of orchestral music and a dash of electronica that swelled over its six sound-and-light towers and an opening-night crowd of 3,500. The opening fanfare was commissioned from the composer Mason Bates, and it signaled — loudly and dramatically — the musical and sonic ambitions of the San Diego Symphony and the yearning of this city to move on from the pandemic.It had all the trappings of a big event, a welcome contrast after 15 years in which the symphony’s outdoor offerings relied on temporary stages and portable toilets. The new space was heralded with fireworks, and a six-course dinner with champagne for donors. The night began with a suitably dramatic flair, as the projected image of the orchestra’s music director, Rafael Payare, instantly recognizable to this crowd, filled a scrim raised nearly to the top of the 57-foot-high stage. After a few build-up-the-tension moments, the scrim dropped to reveal Payare and the orchestra, ready to play. That drew the first of many standing ovations.The night began with a projection of Payare, instantly recognizable in silhouette to this crowd, that filled a scrim raised nearly to the top of the 57-foot-high stage. John Francis Peters for The New York Times“In the way that Disney Hall solidified the mission and importance of the L.A. Phil and the cultural life of L.A., I think this new venue will do the same for an orchestra that really is on the ascent,” said Steven Schick, a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, and the music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. “Those things do happen with new venues.”There were more suits than masks — though not many of either — as people arrived to celebrate this new addition to the San Diego waterfront. It was a dramatic setting: The skyline of San Diego framed the stage on the right, as the masts of sail boats glided past the audience on the left, some dropping anchor to enjoy the show.The venue can hold up to 10,000 people, but its red seats can be removed, making it flexible.  John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPassing boats formed a nautical backdrop for the new concert venue.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesAt the Hollywood Bowl, Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, must sometimes contend with the roar of passing helicopters. Here, Payare’s competition was the put-put-putting of boat engines, the blast of an air horn, and occasional “All Right” shouted from a party boat.The opening fanfare by Bates, “Soundcheck in C Major” — with the composer, 44, sitting in the percussion section, playing an Akai drum machine and two MacBook Pros — was cinematic and bracing. It was composed with this sound system in mind, Bates said in an interview, and written to evoke Wagner, Pink Floyd and Techno beats (he is a D.J. as well as a composer). The whirl of electronic sounds he generated flew out across the audience, ricocheting among the sound-and-light towers.There would be more familiar fare before the night ended — Mozart, Gershwin, Stravinsky. Alisa Weilerstein, an acclaimed cellist who is married to Payare, was the soloist for the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the soloist on “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Ryan Speedo Green, a bass baritone who is a rising star in the opera world, sang several arias. Gladys Knight (without the Pips) took the stage on Sunday night. But the choice of a new inaugural number was a statement by the San Diego Symphony under Payare, who was appointed in 2019.“It shows that the San Diego Symphony is thinking about the future,” Bates said. “They could have opened this with any number of overtures, the Candide Overture. But the San Diego Symphony wanted to show off the capabilities of their space and also make a statement about new art and new work.”Ryan Speedo Green, a bass baritone with an international opera career, sang several arias. John Francis Peters for The New York TimesConstruction on the Rady Shell began in September 2019, and it was supposed to open the following summer. That date was, of course, delayed by the pandemic, which made Friday night particularly welcome after a difficult 16 months for culture in San Diego. “It was decimated, and I’m not exaggerating — particularly the performing arts,” said Jonathon Glus, the executive director of the city’s Commission on Arts and Culture. “A lot of the organizations are still just quasi-opened. I think it’s going to be another two or three years until we truly find out the fallout.”While there were 3,500 people there Friday night, some seated on the red folding seats and others sprawled on the artificial turf, it has a capacity of up to 10,000 seats. And the seats can be removed: It will be a public park when the symphony is not there.From the beginning, the combination of the new space and the new music director was intended to distinguish San Diego in a state with a roster of strong cultural offerings, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This city’s classical music scene has long existed under the cultural shadow of Los Angeles and Dudamel, and that was a challenge when Gilmer took over as chief executive in 2014.“There were people who felt they had to get on a train or the 5 to go to L.A. and hear music on a high level,” Gilmer said, referring to the highway that runs from here to downtown Los Angeles. “That has changed. Or we hope that has changed.”Payare, like Dudamel, is a product of El Sistema, Venezuela’s famed music-training system. He played principal horn under Dudamel at the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, and was a member of the Dudamel fellowship program for conductors at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Dudamel was in the audience on Friday.Payare, 41, said that the new venue opened up new opportunities. “It is going to be a change not only for classical music, but for guest artists who will be going through California,” he said.The performers who opened the new venue took their bows: Payare, the conductor; Mason Bates, the composer; Speedo Green, the bass baritone; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the pianist; and Alisa Weilerstein, the cellist. They received a standing ovation. John Francis Peters for The New York Times“The views, they are fantastic,” he said. “The sound is phenomenal. As an artist, that is what you want.”San Diego has always been popular tourist destination, but visitors are more likely to come here for the beach, the weather and Comic-Con than to see the symphony. But in recent years, a number of philanthropists have stepped in to bolster the city’s cultural offerings and raise its profile.The San Diego Opera almost closed in 2014, after 49 years in operation, but it was revived by a coalition of opera buffs, labor union and community leaders who raised money to transform it and keep it alive. The area has one of the nation’s most prominent regional theaters, the Old Globe. In 2002 the Symphony, which was financially struggling, was saved with a record $100 million gift for its endowment from Irwin Jacobs, the co-founder of Qualcomm, and his wife, Joan. And in 2019 the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center opened as the new home of the La Jolla Music Society.The lead donation to this project — $15 million — came from Ernest and Evelyn Rady, two of San Diego’s most prominent philanthropists. Rady is a billionaire who built his fortune in insurance and real estate.“We have always thought of making this a cultural destination as well as a beach destination and weather destination,” said Jacobs, who, with his wife, donated $11 million toward construction of the venue. “There’s a lot here. We don’t get that story out as well as we should.” More