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Alisa Weilerstein: "I'm now studying Hebrew."

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RICKLES

Passion For Cello

25-year-old Alisa Weilerstein
solos with the DSO.

Suzanne Chessler
Special to the Jewish News

C

ellist Alisa Weilerstein is
about to make her third
appearance with the Detroit
Symphony Orchestra and her first with
the guest conductor, Sir Andrew Davis,
music director of the Lyric Opera of
Chicago.
The all-British program can be
heard Oct. 18-20 at Detroit's Orchestra
Hall. Weilerstein solos with Walton's
Cello Concerto in a program that
includes Elgar's In the South and
Vaughn Williams' Symphony No. 9.
"The Walton piece premiered in
1987, and it's very special, intrigu-
ing and unusual music," explains
Weilerstein, 25, the winner of the 2006
Leonard Bernstein Award presented
at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in
Germany. "It was commissioned and
first played by Piatigorsky with the
Boston Symphony.
"The first movement is very com-
pact, with a dreamy character. It's not
quite romantic harmonic language,
but it's very rhapsodic and ends on a
mysterious note. The second move-
ment is perpetual motion, and there's
something almost nervous about it.
The third movement is the length of
the first two movements combined.
"The composer described the last
section as four improvisations. The
cello plays a mournful melody with
sparse orchestral accompaniment, and
that goes into a rough cello cadenza.
There's a long symphonic segment
with the orchestra playing by itself, and
then there's a second rhapsodic caden-
za, maybe more tragic than the first.
"At the end, the first theme comes
back glittering and goes into a dreamy,
ecstasy-type feeling."
Weilerstein's parents — violin-
ist Donald Weilerstein and pianist
Vivian Hornik Weilerstein — join

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OCT 19 Et 20

their daughter for about 10 of the 100
concerts she performs each year. They
appear together as the Wellerstein
Trio, which is trio-in-residence at the
New England Conservatory in Boston.
Dvorak Trios is the name of the group's
most recent recording.
"My parents always encouraged
me to speak up when I had an idea,"
recalls Weilerstein, who was 5 at the
time of her first concert. "It does seem
more equal now as I'm getting older."
Weilerstein's career got on a fast
track early, and she has traveled to
prestigious venues in many countries,
including New York's Carnegie Hall,
London's Wigmore Hall and Paris'
Louvre Museum. When she was 15,
she toured with her parents to the
Jerusalem Music Center.
A graduate of the Young Artist
Program at the Cleveland Institute
of Music, Weilerstein has studied at
Juilliard and graduated from New
York's Columbia University with a
degree in Russian history in 2004.
Her Jewish upbringing, which
includes a bat mitzvah, was among the
reasons the cellist was appalled that
Columbia invited Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak last
month. Among the Jewish pieces she
likes to perform is Bloch's Shlomo.
"I love learning languages and liter-
ature, and I'm now studying Hebrew,"
says Weilerstein, whose boyfriend
is Israeli violinist Matan Givol. "I'm
using a computer program and Matan
is helping me." Fl

Alisa Weilerstein will perform
Oct. 18-20 at Detroit's Orchestra
Hall, in the Max. M. Fisher
Music Center, 3711 Woodward.
Performances are 8 p.m.
Thursday, 10:45 a.m. Friday and
8:30 p.m. Saturday. $19-$89.
(313) 576-5111.

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October 11 • 2007

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