Alisa Weilerstein

Alisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. Renowned for her consummate artistry, emotional commitment, and rare interpretive depth, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2011. Today, her career is truly international, taking her to the most prestigious venues worldwide for solo recitals, chamber concerts, and concerto collaborations with all of the outstanding conductors and orchestras globally. “Weilerstein is a throwback to an earlier age of classical performers: not content to serve as a vessel for the composer’s wishes, she inhabits a piece and makes it her own,” marvels the New York Times. “Weilerstein’s cello is her self. She doesn’t give the impression that playing music involves any will at all. She and the cello just seem to be one and the same,” agrees the Los Angeles Times. The British Telegraph wrote: “Weilerstein is truly a phenomenon.” Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello occupy a central place in Weilerstein’s current programming. Over the past two seasons, she has performed the complete work live on three continents, with concerts in New York, Washington D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and San Diego, in Aspen and Caramoor, in Tokyo, Osaka, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, London, Manchester, Aldeburgh, Paris, and Barcelona, as well as to a sold-out audience at Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie. During the global pandemic, she further solidified her status as one of the suites’ leading exponents. Her Pentatone recording of the complete set, released in April 2020, became a Billboard bestseller and was named “Album of the Week” by the British Sunday Times. Her insights into Bach’s first G-major Prelude, as captured in Vox’s YouTube series, have been viewed almost 1.5 million times. In the initial weeks of lockdown, she chronicled her deepening 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 noted in its own feature, by presenting these more intimate accounts alongside her new studio recording, Weilerstein offered listeners the rare opportunity to discover whether “the pressure of a pandemic might change a musician’s sound, or help her see a beloved piece in a new way.” At the start of the 2019–20 season, Weilerstein appeared as an artistic partner of the Trondheim Soloists, performing with the Norwegian orchestra in London, Munich, and Bergen, playing, among other works, the two Haydn cello concertos featured on the acclaimed 2018 release “Transfigured Night.” Additionally, she performed ten other concertos by Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Elgar, Strauss, Shostakovich, Britten, Barber, Bloch, Matthias Pintscher, and Thomas Larcher with the London Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, New York Philharmonic, and the symphonies of Houston, Detroit, and San Diego. As a soloist, she performed not only with Bach but also with her frequent duo partner Inon Barnatan, with whom she played Brahms and Shostakovich at London’s Wigmore Hall, Milan’s Sala Verdi, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. To celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, she and the Israeli pianist performed the composer’s five cello sonatas in Cincinnati and Scottsdale, and together with Guy Braunstein and the Dresden Philharmonic, they played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, featured on the duo’s 2019 Pentatone recording with Stefan Jackiw, Alan Gilbert, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Weilerstein is committed to expanding the cello repertoire and is a fervent advocate for new music. She has premiered two significant new concertos, Pascal Dusapin’s Outscape “the kind of debut most composers can only dream of” (Chicago Tribune) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2016, and proved to be “the perfect companion” (Boston Globe) for Matthias Pintscher’s cello concerto un despertar with the Boston Symphony Orchestra the following year. Since then, she has reprised Dusapin’s concerto with the Stuttgart and Paris Opera Orchestras and Pintscher’s concerto with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, as well as with the Danish Radio Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony, both conducted by the composer. Under Pintscher’s baton, she also gave the New York premiere of his Reflections on Narcissus at the New York Philharmonic’s inaugural 2014 Biennial before reprising the work at the BBC Proms in London. She has collaborated extensively with Osvaldo Golijov, who re-orchestrated Azul for cello and orchestra for her New York premiere at the 2007 Mostly Mozart Festival opening. Since then, she has performed the work with orchestras worldwide and has also frequently programmed his Omaramor for solo cello. Grammy-nominated Joseph Hallman has written several 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 gave the world premiere of Lera Auerbach’s 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano with the composer at the piano, and the two subsequently performed the work at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and San Francisco Performances. Weilerstein has appeared with all major orchestras in the US, Europe, and Asia, and has collaborated with conductors such as 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 highly publicized and widely attended classical music event at the White House, featuring student workshops hosted by the First Lady and performances for an audience that included President Obama and the First Family. A month later, Weilerstein toured Venezuela as a soloist with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra under Dudamel. Since then, she has made numerous return visits to teach and perform with the orchestra as part of the renowned El Sistema music education program. Born in 1982, Alisa Weilerstein discovered her love for the cello at the age of two and a half, when she contracted chickenpox and her grandmother assembled a makeshift instrument from cereal boxes to entertain her. Although immediately drawn to the Rice Krispies box cello, Weilerstein soon became frustrated that it produced no sound. After persuading her parents to buy her a real cello at age 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 concerto debut playing Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations with the Cleveland Orchestra, and in March 1997, she performed for the first time at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony. Weilerstein is an alumna of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Richard Weiss, and also holds a degree in history from Columbia University. She was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) at age nine. A passionate advocate for the T1D community, she serves as an advisor for the biotechnology company eGenesis and as a prominent advocate for JDRF, the world’s leading T1D research organization. She comes from a family of musicians, being 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.