Alisa Weilerstein & Inon Barnatan: The Singing Cello
“Technically flawless and deeply expressive” (The New York Times), Alisa Weilerstein makes the cello sing as if it were her own voice. Weilerstein is known for her commanding performances of the classics of the cello repertoire. Renowned pianist Inon Barnatan joins her for this dynamic performance program featuring Manuel de Falla’s Spanish folk-inspired Suite Populaire Espagnole, and Rachmaninoff’s rapturous Cello Sonata.
This concert was professionally recorded in The Baker-Baum Concert Hall at The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla, CA.
“Weilerstein instantly showed the ferociousness of her artistic spirit, pressing into the rhapsodic opening flourishes to inject fire into her sound.” – New York Classical Review
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Program
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- MANUEL DE FALLA Suite Populaire Espagnole (1914)
Hola!…Spanish classical music. What is it, you ask? For a long time this was a tricky concept. The stamping, strumming, and wailing of flamenco certainly qualified, yes, but that did not suit Spanish royalty who ruled the world of acceptable music from their castles. Scarlatti and Boccherini were imported from Italy from that elegance, and the two dominated Spanish music for nearly 100 years. Over in Europe (read: Paris) opera lovers never warmed to the authentic zarzuelas, but Carmen set the world whistling the seguidilla and ‘Spanish music’ became the rage in classical circles. But wait: weird. This ultimate Spanish opera sung in French was written by two Parisians who had never even been to Spain! Nevertheless, Europe was consumed by the idea of Spain. Next they were dazzled by the flamboyant orchestral melodies of Capriccio espagnol. But Oops. Odd again. It was composed by some guy with a double-barreled Russian name! Finally in the very late 19th century real Spaniards such as Granados, Albeniz, and de Falla showed up to wrestle their music away from foreign interpreters. Olé.
De Falla, a pianist-composer born in Andalusia, had immersed himself in folksongs early. He came to realise that “in popular song the spirit is most important. Rhythm, tonality and melodic intervals determine the undulations and cadences and those are the essential constituents of the music. The people prove this themselves by infinitely varying the purely melodic lines. The rhythmic or melodic accompaniment is as important as the song itself. Inspiration is to be found directly in the people.” Armed with this belief he moved to Paris in 1907 to study with Ravel and Debussy. Both of them happened to be working on ‘Spanish’ music at the time. Remember Bolero? How authentic is that?? De Falla theorized that by manipulating the intricate harmonics and raising the melodies by a fifth, the muddy feet of folk songs could be allowed to dance in the concert hall. But that theory needs a whole dissertation, not a mere program note.
During rehearsals for the premiere of his opera La vida breve, rife with Spanish melodies real and invented, a leading singer asked de Falla what Spanish songs she should program in an upcoming art-song recital. Upon consideration, he answered “Mine” and set about writing some. Thus was born Siete Canciones, his most successful, most frequently transcribed work.
De Falla even worked with some of the transcribers, in this case the cellist Maurice Maréchal. Lacking words and voice, he wanted be sure the arrangements at least captured the strumming guitar, the clacking castanets, the stamping flamenco feet, and the lullaby feel of the rocking cradle. He also wanted to be sure no one monkeyed with his theory of raised overtones which give the songs their unique emotional quality. At their heart, all the Canciones deal with love, what else? Fiery, motherly, hopeful, hopeless, joyful, painful, jealous, and disappointed — they are all here. This brief guide will help your imagination navigate these songs without words.
“El Paño moruno” comments with regret on how a beautiful fabric, carelessly stained, can lose its value—a clear warning to young girls pondering possible lovers. Originally a scolding song of a disillusioned suitor followed, but de Falla deleted it here, probably because the cello best personifies warmth, not the bitter anger of a former lover. Hence, siete canciones became sies.
“Asturiana” depicts a willow tree weeping in sympathy with the sorrow of a forsaken lover. The quiet hypnotic repeats in the piano evoke numb bewilderment and despair with the piano ending on the lowest possible note.
“Jota” — A lively Aragonese dance in triple meter whirling to the rhythmic clack of castanets, the jota has an odd ambivalent history — it was often danced at funerals, a memory-laden goodbye. The singer-cello here says another sort of goodbye, remembering an intense love affair as he walks into the distance.
“Nana” — This gentle Andalusian gypsy lullaby sung by his mother was de Falla’s earliest memory. The piano sets a rocking rhythm while the singing cello soothes and sighs. The subtly syncopated accompaniment signals a watchful motherly concern.
“Canción” — A jaunty popular tune dances with the gentle intoxication of first love, then slows down, then ends with grumbling resignation that it all is over.
“Polo” — With flamenco energy the piano stomps in and creates a flurry of strumming guitar sonorities while the cello cries out with a lover’s intensity — first passion, then betrayed anger. The piano punctuates the exhilaration and pain with irregular pounding bass shouts of Ay, Ay, Ay! It all goes by fierce and quickly. Ah, La vide breve!
For a student of Spain, this suite is a concentrated tour of the dances, music, and geography; for the rest of us, it is a Spanish inflected tour of human emotions — an exercise for intense imagination, not a pretty parlor piece but a brief serious visit to a foreign though familiar land. The great French teacher Nadia Boulanger observed: “Nothing is better than when music takes us out of time to another place. It does more for us than we have the right to hope for.” Amen. Olé!
Program Notes by Fredrick Noonan
- SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943) Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19
I. Lento - Allegro moderato
II. Allegro scherzando
III. Andante
IV. Allegro mossoIn late spring of 1901, Sergei Rachmaninoff managed to complete his Piano Concerto No. 2 after enduring a long period of paralyzing depression. “I did nothing and found no pleasure in anything,” Rachmaninoff wrote in his Memoirs. “Half my days were spent lying on a couch and sighing over my ruined life.” In desperation, Rachmaninoff sought help from Dr. Nicolai Dahl, who was also an amateur string player. Dahl, using hypnotic techniques, planted encouraging thoughts in Rachmaninoff’s mind during their sessions. “I heard the same hypnotic formula repeated day after day while I lay half asleep in my armchair in Dr. Dahl’s study: ‘You will begin to write ... You will work with great facility ... It was always the same, without interruption. Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me.”
Freed at last from his mental demons, Rachmaninoff began writing his Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 19 for cellist Anatoly Brandukov in the autumn of 1901. The two men premiered it in Moscow on December 2 of that year.
“I felt that Dr. Dahl’s treatment had strengthened my nervous system to a miraculous degree,” Rachmaninoff recalled some years later. “The joy of creating lasted the next two years, and I wrote a number of large and small pieces including the Sonata for Cello…”
As a child, Rachmaninoff attended Russian Orthodox church services regularly. There he absorbed the sound of the monastic chants used in the church liturgy. These melodies are characterized by a narrow range—usually no more than an octave—and stepwise motion, qualities that shape the expressive melodies and countermelodies of Op. 19.
—© Elizabeth Schwartz
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Artists
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Alisa Weilerstein
Cello
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Alisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. Known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment, and rare interpretive depth, she was recognized with a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship in 2011. 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. “Weilerstein is a throwback to an earlier age of classical performers: not content merely to serve as a vessel for the composer’s wishes, she inhabits a piece fully and turns it to her own ends,” marvels the New York Times. “Weilerstein’s cello is her id. She doesn’t give the impression that making music involves will at all. She and the cello seem simply to be one and the same,” agrees the Los Angeles Times. As the UK’s Telegraph put it, “Weilerstein is truly a phenomenon.”
Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello figure prominently in Weilerstein’s current programming. Over the past two seasons, she has given rapturously received live accounts of the complete set on three continents, with recitals in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and San Diego; at Aspen and Caramoor; in Tokyo, Osaka, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, London, Manchester, Aldeburgh, Paris and Barcelona; and for a full-capacity audience at Hamburg’s iconic new Elbphilharmonie. During the global pandemic, she has further cemented her status as one of the suites’ leading exponents. Released in April 2020, her Pentatone recording of the complete set became a Billboard bestseller and was named “Album of the Week” by the UK’s Sunday Times. As captured in Vox’s YouTube series, her insights into Bach’s first G-major prelude have been viewed almost 1.5 million times. During the first weeks of the lockdown, she chronicled her developing engagement with the suites on social media, fostering an even closer connection with her online audience by streaming a new movement each day in her innovative #36DaysOfBach project. As the New York Times observed in a dedicated feature, by presenting these more intimate accounts alongside her new studio recording, Weilerstein gave listeners the rare opportunity to learn whether “the pressures of a pandemic [can] change the very sound a musician makes, or help her see a beloved piece in a new way.”
Earlier in the 2019-20 season, as Artistic Partner of the Trondheim Soloists, Weilerstein joined the Norwegian orchestra in London, Munich, and Bergen for performances including Haydn’s two cello concertos, as featured on their acclaimed 2018 release, Transfigured Night. She also performed ten more concertos by Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Elgar, Strauss, Shostakovich, Britten, Barber, Bloch, Matthias Pintscher and Thomas Larcher, with the London Symphony Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Houston, Detroit and San Diego symphonies. In recital, besides making solo Bach appearances, she reunited with her frequent duo partner, Inon Barnatan, for Brahms and Shostakovich at London’s Wigmore Hall, Milan’s Sala Verdi, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. To celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, she and the Israeli pianist performed the composer’s five cello sonatas in Cincinnati and Scottsdale, and joined Guy Braunstein and the Dresden Philharmonic for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, as heard on the duo’s 2019 Pentatone recording with Stefan Jackiw, Alan Gilbert and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
Committed to expanding the cello repertoire, Weilerstein is an ardent champion of new music. She has premiered two important new concertos, giving Pascal Dusapin’s Outscape “the kind of debut most composers can only dream of” (Chicago Tribune) with the co-commissioning Chicago Symphony in 2016 and proving herself “the perfect guide” (Boston Globe) to Matthias Pintscher’s cello concerto un despertar with the co-commissioning Boston Symphony the following year. She has since reprised Dusapin’s concerto with the Stuttgart and Paris Opera Orchestras and Pintscher’s with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne and with the Danish Radio Symphony and Cincinnati Symphony, both under the composer’s leadership. It was also under Pintscher’s direction that she gave the New York premiere of his Reflections on Narcissus at the New York Philharmonic’s inaugural 2014 Biennial, before reuniting with him to revisit the work at London’s BBC Proms. She has worked extensively with Osvaldo Golijov, who rewrote Azul for cello and orchestra for her New York premiere performance at the opening of the 2007 Mostly Mozart Festival. Since then she has played the work with orchestras around the world, besides frequently programming his Omaramor for solo cello. Grammy nominee Joseph Hallman has written multiple compositions for her, including a cello concerto that she premiered with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and a trio that she premiered on tour with Barnatan and clarinetist Anthony McGill. At the 2008 Caramoor festival, she premiered Lera Auerbach’s 24 Preludes for Violoncello and Piano with the composer at the keyboard, and the two subsequently reprised the work at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Washington’s Kennedy Center, and for San Francisco Performances.
Weilerstein’s recent Bach and Transfigured Night recordings expand her already celebrated discography. Earlier releases include the Elgar and Elliott Carter cello concertos with Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, named “Recording of the Year 2013” by BBC Music, which made her the face of its May 2014 issue. Her next album, on which she played Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic, topped the U.S. classical chart, and her 2016 recording of Shostakovich’s cello concertos with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Pablo Heras-Casado proved “powerful and even mesmerizing” (San Francisco Chronicle). She and Barnatan made their duo album debut with sonatas by Chopin and Rachmaninoff in 2015, a year after she released Solo, a compilation of unaccompanied 20th-century cello music that was hailed as an “uncompromising and pertinent portrait of the cello repertoire of our time” (ResMusica, France). Solo’s centerpiece is Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello, a signature work that Weilerstein revisits on the soundtrack of If I Stay, a 2014 feature film starring Chloë Grace Moretz in which the cellist makes a cameo appearance as herself.
Weilerstein has appeared with all the major orchestras of the United States, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with conductors including Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Jiří Bělohlávek, Semyon Bychkov, Thomas Dausgaard, Sir Andrew Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Mark Elder, Alan Gilbert, Giancarlo Guerrero, Bernard Haitink, Pablo Heras-Casado, Marek Janowski, Paavo Järvi, Lorin Maazel, Cristian Măcelaru, Zubin Mehta, Ludovic Morlot, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Peter Oundjian, Rafael Payare, Donald Runnicles, Yuri Temirkanov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Osmo Vänskä, Joshua Weilerstein, Simone Young and David Zinman. In 2009, she was one of four artists invited by Michelle Obama to participate in a widely celebrated and high-profile classical music event at the White House, featuring student workshops hosted by the First Lady and performances in front of an audience that included President Obama and the First Family. A month later, Weilerstein toured Venezuela as soloist with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra under Dudamel, since when she has made numerous return visits to teach and perform with the orchestra as part of its famed El Sistema music education program.
Born in 1982, Alisa Weilerstein discovered her love for the cello at just two and a half, when she had chickenpox and her grandmother assembled a makeshift set of instruments from cereal boxes to entertain her. Although immediately drawn to the Rice Krispies box cello, Weilerstein soon grew frustrated that it didn’t produce any sound. After persuading her parents to buy her a real cello at the age of four, she developed a natural affinity for the instrument and gave her first public performance six months later. At 13, in 1995, she made her professional concert debut, playing Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations with the Cleveland Orchestra, and in March 1997 she made her first Carnegie Hall appearance with the New York Youth Symphony. A graduate of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Richard Weiss, Weilerstein also holds a degree in history from Columbia University. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) at nine years old, and is a staunch advocate for the T1D community, serving as a consultant for the biotechnology company eGenesis and as a Celebrity Advocate for JDRF, the world leader in T1D research. Born into a musical family, she is the daughter of violinist Donald Weilerstein and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, and the sister of conductor Joshua Weilerstein. She is married to Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, with whom she has a young child.