CELLO CONCERT SHUFFLE-PLAYS BACH, RECENT COMPOSERS
On Tuesday, Alisa Weilerstein presented a concert of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major interleaved with five living composers. Who were they? Unless you grabbed a pamphlet-sized program on your way out the door of Baker-Baum Concert Hall at The Conrad in La Jolla, you’d never know.
I’m great at playing “Drop The Needle,” but even I was at a loss to identify who wrote the recent music on Weilerstein’s concert, “Fragments I.”
She commissioned 28 people to respond to the six Cello Suites by Bach with short multi-movement compositions, with the understanding that she could select and re-order their music as she chose.
The result, a co-production by the San Diego Symphony and La Jolla Music Society, was an unbroken musical stream-of-consciousness for roughly 70 minutes in which each piece f lowed into the next with no applause.
Weilerstein writes that she wanted “to strip away our own natural instincts to categorize and contextualize everything we hear and
see … what would our experience of music be like if we could be given the chance to simply listen first?”
You know what my experience was? Frustration. I get paid to categorize and
contextualize music.
My thoughts at the beginning were: “What’s this piece? It’s not Bach. It’s lyrical and dramatic, with long melodies that take advantage of Weilerstein’s
cantabile tone.”
“Oh hey, it’s a new piece. There are upward plucked arpeggios and then loudly plucked repeated notes. Well, this is a contrast to the previous piece.”
“Another piece. Hey, I know this, it’s the second Menuet from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1!”
“Aaaaaand I have no idea what this next piece is. Or how it relates to Bach, other than it’s for solo cello.”
And so it went, passing through unrecognizable landscapes until another movement of the Bach Suite no. 1 was revealed. Then back again to more unfamiliar music.
Weilerstein assembled the program intuitively. She commissioned a diverse group of composers in terms of age, gender, or ethnicity. We had an elder American stateswoman, Joan Tower; Chinese-American Boomer Chen Yi; and younger composers Reinaldo Moya (from Venezuela), flautist Gili Schwarzman (from Tel Aviv, whose Preludium is her first composition), and AfricanAmerican f lautist/composer Allison Loggins-Hull.
Could I hear any of this diversity ref lected in their compositions? No. (Their stylistic differences might be more apparent with repeated listening and/or score study). They generally tended toward a middle-ofthe-road musical language. A piece from Liza Lim, Mary Halvorson, or George Lewis would have really expanded the musical diversity here.
The winningest moment on the program was in saving the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 — the best known movement in all six Suites — for the ending. It gave the entire concert a dramatic sense of arrival.
Weilerstein’s performance throughout was riveting. She is one of, if not the, pre-eminent cellists of the Millennial generation, and her exquisite tone, fierce concentration, and theatricality were enthralling, even if I had no idea what she performed.
A minimalist set of equally wide rectangular panels that varied in height encircled her, and each new work was underscored by a change in lighting, with Bach getting a full-spectrum white light treatment, the more recent composers, discrete colors.
I hope a video of this and the other five projected programs will be issued. I can’t be the only attendee from Tuesday who wishes they could experience that concert again, this time armed with the knowledge of who and what we were hearing.