Alisa Weilerstein’s ‘FRAGMENTS’ reimagines what an instrumental recital can sound and look like
In November 2020, Alisa Weilerstein did something virtually unthinkable: She put her cello away. It was what Weilerstein, one of the world’s most acclaimed cellists, called “my own personal low point during the lockdown phase of the pandemic.” After a “relatively open” September in which she’d played several concerts in Europe, she’d seen 15 engagements disappear in as many days. At least for a time, she was done.
“I didn’t want to hear any more bad news,” she said during a recent interview from her San Diego home. “I just wanted to walk along the cliffs here and enjoy my family and not have anything to do with the cello. I packed it up and remember saying, ‘We need a break from each other.’”
When she started playing again a couple of weeks later — an eternity for a professional musician — she began with scales, always a meditative activity for her. And in the midst of those scales, she began thinking about what concert life would and should be like when it returned to something like normalcy. As long as the world had been turned upside down, she recalled thinking, “why not try to rethink the concert — what it really feels like to be experiencing live music in the moment?”
Weilerstein longed for the experience of sharing music with an audience once again. But she also thought that the classical concert experience had become somewhat ossified, even antediluvian. Audience members at a concert, for instance, were almost inevitably handed notes about the music they were about to hear, as if they couldn’t necessarily be trusted to absorb the music without prior information.
Why couldn’t they just listen and react, as happens in lots of other art forms? How could she renew that intense feeling of connection that was part and parcel of her whole approach to music? Or, as she put it, “Can it be received in a more primal way, so that we’re overthinking less and feeling more?”
She put down the cello and began scribbling notes about what a different kind of concert experience might look like. “Epiphanies don’t happen often,” she said, “but when they do they’re a lot of fun.”
The end result, after more than two years of conception, planning, and practicing, is “FRAGMENTS,” a multiyear, multisensory undertaking that aims to reimagine what an instrumental recital can sound and look like. Each of its six programs interweaves one of Bach’s solo cello suites with works by a selection of the 27 composers she enlisted to compose new music for the project, a list that includes voices as dissimilar as Osvaldo Golijov, Matthias Pintscher, Caroline Shaw, Gabriela Lena Frank, Joan Tower, and Tania León.
Massachusetts audiences get their first chance to sample this ambitious creation when Weilerstein brings “FRAGMENTS 2 to Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall Wednesday. (She will also perform “FRAGMENTS 1” in a Celebrity Series of Boston concert Nov. 5.)
Weilerstein takes E.M. Forster’s famous epigraph to “Howards End” — “Only connect” — as her maxim, and connections abound in this endeavor. Chief among them are the musical ones. Weilerstein made the same request of each composer: to write about 10 minutes of solo cello music divided into two or three “fragments,” in whatever style they chose. Some made explicit reference to Bach in their pieces; others didn’t. But she stipulated that each composer had to consent to having their music interspersed with movements from whichever Bach suite is on the program, or with the fragments of other composers.
She’s also put strict limits on what people know about a program before the performance begins. There are no program notes; audience members are told before a concert just the names of the composers being played and that the concert will last about an hour. Only afterward — once music of highly varied styles and musical languages, sequenced in an unfamiliar way, has been heard and absorbed — do listeners get what Weilerstein called “the full menu.”
“Something that I kept writing down in those first days was, how can we get rid of our own unconscious . . . bias?” she recalled. She contrasted the familiar concert experience with the way one often encounters new artwork in a museum. “You’re immediately struck by the beauty of that painting, or maybe you’re struck by the fact you really don’t like it. But you’re not thinking, Who did they study with? What were their influences? Where do they come from? You find that out later.
“I wanted to recreate that in the concert form,” she continued, “which we kind of do the opposite of. I wanted to try to access that primal connection with music, which I sometimes feel like we lose in the midst of overthinking and over-contextualization.”
The same goal is behind the theatrical dimension of the concerts, which were created by director Elkhanah Pulitzer, lighting designer Seth Reiser, and costumer by Carlos J Soto in collaboration with Weilerstein. She said that the set consists of a group of lighting boxes, configured differently for each program. But she was reluctant to divulge more for fear of giving too much away in advance.
Weilerstein premiered the first two “FRAGMENTS” programs in a single concert in Toronto earlier this year. “I’ve never been more nervous for anything in my life because of all the reasons that you might expect,” she said. “It was two solid hours of music, and people were with me from beginning to end. It was a very special evening.”
She added that “there were some who I know were taking a leap of faith, and they let me know they were taking a leap of faith by supporting [this project], and they came back fully convinced. And that was especially gratifying.”
‘I wanted to try to access that primal connection with music.’
ALISA WEILERSTEIN, cellist, on creating “FRAGMENTS”