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Lera Auerbach, piano & Alisa Weilerstein, cello |
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Music: Festival and Indoors > Festival > 2008 Festival > Lera Auerbach, piano & Alisa Weilerstein, cello
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JULY 11 LERA AUERBACH & ALISA WEILERSTEIN
Friday, 8:00pm
Spanish Courtyard
Alisa Weilerstein, cello; Lera Auerbach, piano
Ascending stars in the musical firmament, composer, pianist, and poet Lera Auerbach and Caramoor favorite Alisa Weilerstein journeyed through a sublime and poetic Russian soundscape. With the composer at the piano, these two brilliant artists presented the world premiere of Auerbach's Twenty-four Preludes for Violoncello & Piano.
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ABOUT THE MUSIC
Lera Auerbach
b. 1974
Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, No.1, Op. 69
I began working on the piece while reading Herman Hesse’s novel Demian. Although there is no direct connection and the work is not programmatic, perhaps some of the imagery from Hesse’s novel may have infiltrated the writing, especially in the first movement - Allegro moderato - where I thought of a dance of Abraxas, a mysterious god, who combines in himself both good and evil. In this sonata, as well as in my other chamber music works, the piano is an equal partner and almost never just an accompaniment. In a dramatic sense the instruments often play different roles and different characters even though they might be playing at the same time. At times this co-existence is a dialogue, at times a struggle, at times an attempt to solve inner questions.
The sonata starts with solos of both instruments in which the piano has a dark, inescapable, terrifying statement with inner tension already present within its material, and the cello a more human, desperate, questioning solo. The very first “calling” statement of the cello becomes a leitmotif throughout the sonata. The introduction leads to a dark and strange waltz in 5/4 – as if from the depth of the past shadows have emerged. The second theme is both dreamy and passionate and leads to a fugal development with its dry twists.The juxtaposition of the instruments is also present in the Adagio of the second movement where the piano carries column-like steady choral progression while the cello has a lamenting monologue, free and deeply human. The third movement - Allegro assai - is a toccata with fiery syncopations and obsessive energy. The last movement is one of the most intense and tragic pieces I have written. It starts on a very high emotional point – with the cello playing microtonal trills meant to sound more like the most intense vibrato. The image I had in mind is that of the time in life when you are standing at the very edge of an abyss when nothing is left of the past and of the future and you are alone with your trembling soul. But through the darkness and tragedy somehow there is also an inner light that emerges. At times through pain one may find lost beauty and meaning, and a feeling of tragedy may release something in one’s soul that was aching to be freed. And both instruments rise at the end to a breathtaking height of their registers as if entering a different kind of existence.
I completed most of the sonata while in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during the summer of 2002. The Sonata No. 1 for Violoncello and Piano is dedicated to David Finckel and Wu Han and was co-commissioned by Hancher Auditorium/The University of Iowa and the Music in the Park Series, St. Paul, MN.
- Lera Auerbach
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Dmitri Shostakovich
1906-1975
Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 40
In 1934 Dmitri Shostakovich was busy fulfilling the predictions of a glorious career made in 1925, when he had produced, as his graduation piece from the Leningrad Conservatory, the First Symphony, a remarkable work for any nineteen-year-old composer. In the years that followed he wrote a great deal of music in every genre, demonstrating a vein of lyricism and another of satirical and ironic wit. He spent three years composing the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; perhaps in reaction to that large task, he turned out the much smaller Cello Sonata, Opus 40.
In August 1934, Shostakovich quarreled seriously with his wife and spent several nights in a friend’s empty Moscow apartment. Unable to sleep, he turned to composition and completed the first movement of the cello sonata in two days. The remainder of the sonata he composed in the Crimea, completing the work shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. He dedicated the score to the wealthy cellist and conductor Victor Kubatsky, with whom he performed the piece in public and took it on tour. It was while he and Kubatsky were in Archangelsk for a performance of this sonata in January 1936 that Shostakovich experienced the chill of the fear of death that remained with him for the rest of his life: at the railroad station he read an article in Pravda attacking his Lady Macbeth opera as “Chaos instead of music.” The article had been dictated by Stalin himself, which made the enormous, worldwide success of the opera suddenly irrelevant. For the next forty years Shostakovich found it necessary to present a mask, a public musical persona, to conform to Soviet expectations.
The Cello Sonata is in four movements alternating between the composer’s lyric and ironic styles. The sonata form of the first movement is perhaps less dramatic than one might expect; the cello sings throughout, and the piano accompaniment is generally content with providing support. Despite the romantic lyricism of the second theme, the mood is bleak, especially in the coda, when cold staccato octaves in the piano run unfeelingly under the cello’s dying fall. The second movement is a lively waltz, perhaps suggesting a Russian folk song in the constant reiteration of the basic figure, but treated with an ironic humor. The Largo is a moving lament, again featuring the cello’s passionate melodic keening. The Finale is a brilliantly grotesque showpiece, a galop borrowed from the musical theater but made much more cynical and sarcastic than such theatrical forebears as Offenbach’s can can; the most familiar example in Shostakovich’s own work comes from his satirical ballet score The Age of Gold. Here the composer’s bite and wit is turned to the service of instrumental virtuosity.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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Lera Auerbach
Twenty-four Preludes for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 47 1999-2007
Commissioned by Tom and Vivian Waldeck in association with the Caramoor International Music Festival.
Dedicated to John Neumeier.
Re-establishing the value and expressive possibilities of all major and minor tonalities is as valid at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was during Bach's time, especially if we consider the esthetics of Western music and its travels in regard – or disregard - to tonality during the last century. The Twenty-Four Preludes for Violoncello and Piano follow the circle of fifths, thus covering the entire western tonal spectrum.
By writing this work, I wished to create a continuum that would allow these short movements to be united as one single composition. Looking at something familiar yet from an unexpected perspective is one of the peculiar characteristics of these pieces - they are often not what they appear to be at first glance.
When I think of these violoncello and piano preludes, I compare them to the lake Inyshka in the Urals Mountains, where my family would vacation during the summers of my childhood. The lake looked peaceful, but I knew it was dangerous as it had a double bottom. According to the legend, Emelian Pugachev buried his treasures in this lake, but everything was lost, as the treasures sank into the deep hidden level below the visible ground.
A musical gesture that may seem simple - becomes multi-layered, not quite real or even grotesque because of its surrounding. I employ different musical styles, but this poly-stylism is not a goal in itself but rather an attempt to explore our own kaleidoscopic time full of contradictions, with its madness, loneliness, brutality and aching nostalgia for lost innocence.
At the end of the last prelude, themes from each of the twenty-four preludes are presented as a continuous stream of consciousness, as if combined in a quick glance, and tonality is once again lost in this mad run, surrounded by the apocalyptic chords of the piano.
The Twenty-Four Preludes for Violoncello and Piano, in their full concert version, receive their world premiere at the Caramoor Music Festival in this summer of 2008, almost nine years from their inception. Throughout these nine years, these preludes have gone through various transformations and individual preludes from this cycle have been performed in concert halls around the world. Preludes were also choreographed, in a slightly different order and with some additional music, by John Neumeier - to whom they are dedicated, - and performed by the Hamburg State Ballet for the ballet production “Preludes CV” in Hamburg and Baden-Baden.
- Lera Auerbach
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
 | Lera Auerbach, piano ~ One of the most widely performed composers of the new generation, Lera Auerbach is the youngest only American on the roster of Hamburg’s prestigious international music publishing company Hans Sikorski, home to Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Schnittke, Gubaidulina and Kancheli. A virtuoso performer, Lera continues the great tradition of pianist-composers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Auerbach's compositions have been commissioned and performed by a wide array of artists, orchestras and ballet companies including Gidon Kremer, the Kremerata Baltica, David Finckel, Wu Han, Vadim Gluzman, The Tokyo, Kuss and Petersen String Quartets, the SWR and NDR (Hannover) Symphony Orchestras, NDR Hamburg and the Royal Danish Ballet. Lera Auerbach’s music has also been commissioned and performed by leading Festivals throughout the world including Caramoor, Lucerne, Lockenhaus, Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein.
Lera Auerbach has appeared as solo pianist at such prestigious venues as the Bolshoi Saal of Moscow Conservatory, Tokyo’s Opera City, New York’s Lincoln Center, Munich's Herkulessaal, Oslo's Konzerthaus, Chicago’s Symphony Hall and Washington's Kennedy Center. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in May 2002 performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica. Lera Auerbach’s music has been presented at Carnegie Hall each season since then. In 2005 she was awarded the prestigious Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany.
Born in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals bordering Siberia, Lera Auerbach became one of the last artists to defect the Soviet Union during a concert tour in 1991 while still in her teens. She subsequently earned Bachelor and Master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, where she studied piano with Joseph Kalichstein and composition with Milton Babbit and Robert Beaser. In 2002 she graduated from the prestigious piano soloist program of the Hannover Hochschule für Musik where she studied with Einar-Steen Nøkleberg.
In 2000 and 2004, Ms. Auerbach was invited by the International Johannes Brahms Foundation to live and work at the composer’s former home in Baden-Baden as the Artist-in-Residence and another stay is already being planned for 2007. In 2001, at the invitation of Gidon Kremer, she was Composer-in-Residence and guest artist at the Lockenhaus Festival in Austria, where twelve of her works were premiered. She was subsequently invited to be Composer-in-Residence with the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Japan and the American Youth Symphony in Los Angeles 2003. She is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Bremen Music Festival and was awarded the “Förderpreis Deutschlandfunk“ in recognition of this residency.
Auerbach’s recognition is attributed not only to her musical activities but also to her writing. In 1996, she was named Poet of the Year by the International Pushkin Society. Her literary works include 5 volumes of poetry and prose and numerous contributions to Russian-language literary papers and magazines. Her poetry is taught in Russian schools and universities as required reading for modern literature courses.
Following the successfully received recording of Lera Auerbach’s 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano in 2003 with Vadim Gluzman (violin) and Angela Yoffe (piano), BIS released two follow up discs of Lera’s works in 2006: Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano coupled with Lonely Suite – also performed by Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe (BIS CD-1592) – and 24 Preludes for Piano, 10 Dreams and Chorale, Fugue and Postlude performed by Lera herself (BIS CD-1462). A further new CD has also just been released on Capriccio featuring Lera Auerbach’s String Quartet No. 3 performed by the Petersen Quartet. It is coupled with Lera's arrangement of Shostakovich’s Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva.
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Alisa Weilerstein, cello ~ The 25-year old American cellist Alisa Weilerstein has attracted widespread recognition for playing that combines natural virtuosity and with impassioned musicianship. Ms. Weilerstein has performed with the nation’s top orchestras, given recitals in music capitals throughout the U.S. and Europe, and regularly participates in prestigious international festivals. She is also dedicated to performing chamber music, having grown up in a family of musicians with whom she collaborated from an early age. Regularly lauded for her interpretive instincts coupled with technical prowess, the New York Times wrote of a performance that Ms. Weilerstein “radiated such concentration and pleasure…that watching her became a lesson in the art of listening.” Following her recent New York Philharmonic debut, performing the Elgar Cello Concerto, Newsday wrote that “to hear Weilerstein play is to experience the serenity of being in a master’s hands.”
Ms. Weilerstein is already continually engaged by orchestras across the U.S. and has performed as soloist with the Baltimore Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Saint Louis Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, among others. In Europe she has performed with the Barcelona Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon, Leipziger Bachkollegium, Orchestre National de France, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. She makes regular appearances at festivals such as the Aspen Music Festival, Bad Kissingen, Blossom Music Festival, Caramoor, Green Music Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein, Spoleto USA, Vail, Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, and the Verbier Festival. Ms. Weilerstein was recently named the winner of the 2006 Leonard Bernstein Award, which she received at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany.
During the 2006-07 season Ms. Weilerstein made her New York Philharmonic subscription debut performing the Elgar Cello Concerto with Zubin Mehta conducting, and performed with the Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel in Tokyo during the Philharmonic’s 2006 Japan Korea visit. She also made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra with Christoph Eschenbach conducting, and gave recitals with violinist Maxim Vengerov and pianist Lilya Zilberstein at Carnegie Hall, La Salle Pleyel in Paris and the Barbican in London. Other highlights of Ms. Weilerstein’s 2006-07 season include performances with the Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, and the Moscow State Symphony as part of their U.S. tour, among other engagements. She also gives a U.S. tour with Gil Shaham and Friends that includes a performance at Zankel Hall in May. This summer Ms. Weilerstein will give two trio recitals with Maxim Vengerov and Igor Levit at the Dr. Anton Philips Hall in The Hague and at Cadogan Hall in London. She will give the New York premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s cello concerto, Azul, during the opening concerts of the Mostly Mozart festival, and performs again with the New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel at the Vail Festival. She also performs with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ludovic Morlot at the Mann Center. During the 2007-08 season Ms. Weilerstein will perform with the Detroit Symphony under Sir Andrew Davis, the Pittsburgh Symphony under Marek Janowski, the San Diego Symphony under Jahja Ling, the San Francisco Symphony under David Roberston, and the Toronto Symphony under Peter Oundjian, among many other engagements. She will also give several recitals throughout the U.S., including the Celebrity Series in Boston. Abroad she will perform with the NDR Hamburg under Manfred Honik, the New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel at the Hong Kong Festival, and will give recitals in Bergamo and Milan, Italy.
Ms. Weilerstein has given recitals in music centers across the U.S., including Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Portland and San Francisco. She performed at The Louvre in her Paris recital debut in September 1999. Other notable engagements have included an eight-city tour of Japan, featuring a Suntory Hall performance in March 1999, a concert tour of Australia, and Florida tours with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 2000 and 2002.
Alisa Weilerstein was the recipient in 2000 of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and was selected for two prestigious young artists programs in 2000-01, the ECHO (European Concert Hall Organization) “Rising Stars” recital series and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two. As part of the ECHO series in 2000-01, Ms. Weilerstein gave recitals at seven celebrated concert halls in Europe (Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Wigmore Hall in London, Athens Concert Hall, the Cologne Philharmonie, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam) as well as at Carnegie Hall (Weill Recital Hall), which nominated her to be part of the series. Ms. Weilerstein also released an acclaimed recording on EMI Classics’ “Debut” series in 2000 including works by Paganini, Dvorák, Ginastera, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Janácek, Saint-Saëns, Fauré and De Falla.
Having begun playing the cello at age 4, Ms. Weilerstein performed her first public concert six months later. She often plays with her parents, Donald and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, as the Weilerstein Trio, which is the Trio-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Her Cleveland Orchestra debut was in October 1995, at age 13, playing the Tchaikovsky “Rococo” Variations. She made her Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Youth Symphony in March 1997. Ms. Weilerstein is a graduate of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Richard Weiss. In May 2004, she graduated from Columbia University in New York with a degree in Russian History. For more information on Ms. Weilerstein, please visit www.alisaweilerstein.com
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