Alisa Weilerstein’s summer: Caramoor residency, BBC Proms, and feature film debut

This summer, MacArthur Fellow Alisa Weilerstein serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Caramoor International Music Festival, which devotes its final weekend to a trio of concerts celebrating her artistry as a recitalist, chamber musician, and orchestral soloist. Thus the cellist – one of ten nominees for Gramophone’s 2014 Artist of the Year award – not only gives a solo recital, juxtaposing works by Kodály, Golijov, and Britten with unaccompanied Bach (July 31), but partners the Ariel Quartet in string quintets by Schubert and Boccherini (Aug 1) and, joined for the festival’s grand finale by Pablo Heras-Casado and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, offers audiences the chance to hear, live, the interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto that won her BBC Music magazine’s coveted “2013 Recording of the Year” award (Aug 3). After a residency at the Aspen Music Festival (Aug 5–8), Weilerstein makes her Saratoga Performing Arts Center debut in Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Stéphane Denève (Aug 21), before heading to Europe to revisit music from another of her hit Decca Classics albums, with late summer performances of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto at London’s BBC Proms (Aug 24) and at the Rheingau and Montreux festivals (Aug 26 & 28). Like her recording of the concerto, which topped the U.S. classical chart earlier this month, all three concerts feature the Czech Philharmonic under Jirí Belohlávek. Late August also brings the release of If I Stay, a feature film based on the best-selling novel by Gayle Forman, in which the cellist makes a cameo appearance as herself alongside award-winning actress Chloë Grace Moretz.

For her first appearance at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, New York, Weilerstein gives a solo recital anchored by Kodály’s Sonata for solo cello, a signature work in which the New York Times finds her “staggering.” Together with Bach’s Third Cello Suite and Tema “Sacher,” a Britten miniature, her program is completed by Omaramor by Osvaldo Golijov, with whom she has worked extensively; indeed, the Argentinean composer rewrote his Azul for cello and orchestra especially for her season-opening appearance at the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Weilerstein presents similar solo recital programs at the Sydney Opera House (July 7), the Melbourne Recital Centre (July 8), and during her residency at Aspen (Aug 6). Omaramor may also be heard soon on Solo, her compilation of unaccompanied 20^th-century cello music, which is scheduled for U.S. release by Decca in October, with the Kodály sonata as its centerpiece. And the cellist’s account of the Kodály is captured once again in the summer movie If I Stay, an August 22 release that marks her feature film debut.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto is one that has already figured prominently in Weilerstein’s career. Her live rendition with the Berlin Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim impressed the New York Times as “incandescent,” while The Guardian’s Tom Service declared it “the most technically complete and emotionally devastating performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto that I have ever heard live”; the concert was televised to an audience of millions worldwide, and subsequently issued on DVD. For her award-winning debut release as an exclusive Decca artist, Weilerstein – the first cellist to be signed by the prestigious label in more than 30 years – reunited with Barenboim at the Staatskapelle Berlin, pairing Elgar’s concerto with Elliot Carter’s. For her final, festival-closing performance at Caramoor, which will be broadcast live on WQXR, she reprises the concerto with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the leadership of Pablo Heras-Casado, with whom she previously collaborated on Shostakovich with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Amsterdam.

To round out her residency at the New York festival, Weilerstein joins forces with the Ariel Quartet, winner of the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, for a chamber recital crowned by Schubert’s transcendent String Quintet in C.

For Weilerstein’s SPAC debut, she performs Saint-Saëns’s Concerto No. 1 with the Philadelphia Orchestra; it was one of her recent collaborations with the orchestra that prompted the Philadelphia Inquirer to marvel:

“A spontaneous roar would have been appropriate for Alisa Weilerstein’s individuality. It’s hard to imagine a player with a more complex and varied sound, or access to a deeper well of emotions. She was by turns lithe, penetrating, mournful, fragile, and heroic.”

Weilerstein concludes the summer playing Dvorák’s Cello Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic and Jirí Belohlávek, as on her recent, chart-topping Decca Classics release, on which her performance is distinguished by a “take-no-prisoners emotional investment that is evident in every bar” (New York Times). After her August performances in London’s Royal Albert Hall and at the German and Swiss festivals, she looks forward to revisiting the Dvorák with the New York Philharmonic in December.

Details of Alisa Weilerstein’s upcoming engagements are provided below, and more information is available at the artist’s web site: alisaweilerstein.com.

Alisa Weilerstein: summer engagements

July 2

Napier, New Zealand