Czech Phil: The Spring Stars I • Alisa Weilerstein

A box of rice cereal served as Alisa Weilerstein’s very first cello when she was two and a half years old. Little Alisa caught the chickenpox just when her musical parents (her mother is a pianist and her father is a violinist) were on a world tour, so her grandmother was coming up with fun ideas. The biggest hit was a set of musical instruments made with breakfast cereal boxes, but Alice was only interested in the cello. Unfortunately, that cello could not be played. Two years later, little Alisa’s parents finally let her persuade them to get her a real instrument. Six months later, she played it in public for the first time. At age 13 she played with the Cleveland Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall opened its doors to her for the first time when she reached age 15. She did not, however, allow musical institutions to limit her to a one-sided musical orientation, so after graduating from the Youth Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, she went to Columbia University to study Russian history (both of her parents have Russian roots). Nonetheless, her study plan included several hours of daily practice on the cello, and at the same time she had a busy schedule of concerts!

This American cellist’s popularity led to a concert appearance at the White House, where she was received by the president’s family in 2008, and her artistic prestige earned her a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation (2011) and an award from BBC Music Magazine for the “Recording of the Year 2013” (cello concertos by Edward Elgar and Elliott Carter with Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin). At the time, she was already routinely giving concerts with top orchestras in the USA, Europe, and Asia. She also continues to give solo recitals, earning acclaim especially for her interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. She has also recorded the whole cycle on CD (nominated for a prize from the journal Gramophone), and during the pandemic she made live recordings at home for a project titled 36 Days of Bach (one movement from a suite every day). Because she is also a major proponent of contemporary music, she also created a multimedia project titled Fragments, which combines the aforementioned Bach suite movements with 27 newly composed pieces. All of this was done with the famed theatrical and operatic stage director Elkhanah Pulitzer supervising visual aspects of the project, which sets out to “find new ways to connect the audience and artist”. The project has already been heard at such venues as Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

That, however, is not the end of her service to today’s cello literature: contemporary composers are writing more works for her with solo concertos by Joan Tower, Matthias Pintscher, Pascal Dusapin, and Richard Blackford at the forefront. It is the premiere of Blackford’s concerto that awaits us at today’s concert under the baton of Tomáš Netopil. Weilerstein’s long-term collaboration with the Czech Philharmonic dates back to 2013 at the Dvořák Prague Festival, when she played Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. A year later, the concerto’s release on CD received great acclaim from critics. “In Bělohlávek and the Czech Philharmonic, [Weilerstein] has chosen ideal partners”, commented Hugh Cunning in The Sunday Times. Weilerstein also has only the fondest memories of working with the Czech Philharmonic: “I really, really love the sound of the orchestra—there is a kind of lyricism and tenderness, which I don’t often hear in Dvořák playing.” This is perhaps why Weilerstein has come to Prague several more times and even performed with the Czech Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on tour in 2018. Her younger brother, the conductor Joshua Weilerstein, and her husband, the Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, have also appeared with the orchestra at the Rudolfinum.

Born in the Czech Republic, Jakub Hrůša is Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, Music Director Designate of The Royal Opera, Covent Garden (Music Director from 2025), Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. 

He is a frequent guest with the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Vienna, Berlin, Munich and New York Philharmonics; Bavarian Radio, NHK, Chicago and Boston Symphonies; Leipzig Gewandhaus, Lucerne Festival, Royal Concertgebouw, Mahler Chamber and The Cleveland Orchestras; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Tonhalle Orchester Zürich. He has led opera productions for the Salzburg Festival (Káťa Kabanová with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2022), Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris. He has also been a regular guest with Glyndebourne Festival and served as Music Director of Glyndebourne On Tour for three years.

His relationships with leading vocal and instrumental soloists have included collaborations in recent seasons with Daniil Trifonov, Mitsuko Uchida, Hélène Grimaud, Behzod Abduraimov, Anne Sofie Mutter, Lisa Batiashvili, Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Rudolf Buchbinder, Gautier Capuçon, Julia Fischer, Sol Gabetta, Hilary Hahn, Janine Jansen, Karita Mattila, Leonidas Kavakos, Lang Lang, Josef Špaček, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Yuja Wang, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Alisa Weilerstein and others. 

As a recording artist, Jakub Hrůša has received numerous awards and nominations for his discography. Most recently, he received the Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year 2023 prize and the ICMA prize for Symphonic Music for his recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for his recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, both with Bamberg Symphony. In 2021, his disc of Martinů and Bartók violin concertos with Bamberg Symphony and Frank Peter Zimmermann was nominated for BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone awards, and his recording of the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Augustin Hadelich was nominated for a Grammy Award. 

Jakub Hrůša studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where his teachers included Jiří Bělohlávek. He is President of the International Martinů Circle and The Dvořák Society. He was the inaugural recipient of the Sir Charles Mackerras Prize, and in 2020 was awarded both the Antonín Dvořák Prize by the Czech Republic’s Academy of Classical Music, and – together with Bamberg Symphony – the Bavarian State Prize for Music. 

Marek Eben was born in 1957 in Prague. He studied music drama at the Prague Conservatoire. After finishing school, he worked at the Vítězslav Nezval Theatre in Karlovy Vary, then at the Kladno Theatre, and from 1983 to 2002 he was an ensemble member at Prague’s Studio Ypsilon Theatre. Besides acting, he also involves himself with music. He is the exclusive songwriter for the band The Eben Brothers, which has released five albums (Malé písně do tmy, 1984; Tichá domácnost, 1995; Já na tom dělám, 2002; Chlebíčky, 2008; Čas holin, 2014), and he wrote the music for the films Bizon and Hele on letí and for the television series Poste restante. He has also composed music and written texts for about 20 plays (including Matěj Poctivý – Matthew the Honest, Vosková figura – The Wax Figure, Amerika, and Othello for Studio Ypsilon and The Winter’s Tale for the National Theatre). Since 1996, he has been the moderator of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

He has worked extensively on television, serving as the moderator of various programmes such as the contest O poklad Anežky České (The Treasure of St Agnes of Bohemia), the TýTý Awards Presentation, Stardance, and the discussion programme Na plovárně (At the Swimming Pool), which won the Elsa Award in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 for the best talk show. Marek Eben has also won this prize as a moderator in 2001, 2002, 2006, and 2007. He is also the two-time overall winner of the TýTý Awards.

The English composer Edward Elgar grew up in the family of a church organist who owned a shop that sold sheet music and instruments. Little Edward began playing the piano at school, and he learned to play the organ by watching his father. He also borrowed a variety of instruments from the family shop and taught himself to play them without receiving any kind of instruction, so he soon mastered not only piano and organ, but also violin, viola, cello, and bassoon. He also began composing in a similar manner. At age 16 he became a free-lance musician, so he got experience mainly as an instrumentalist, church organist, and conductor. He mostly composed choral music, but he did not achieve true renown as a composer until he reached the age of 42, when he wrote his Enigma Variations, Op. 36. The great conductor Hans Richter held the work in high esteem and prepared and led its premiere. The idea of creating a set of variations with a secret, “encoded” theme is indicative of Elgar’s unusual imaginativeness, and as a self-taught composer, he was not under any restraints. The work is a covert tribute to the composer’s wife Alice and to the friends who supported Elgar during the years of uncertainty as he got his start as a composer.

Another of Elgar’s most important works is the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. Just choosing the cello as a solo instrument represents a great challenge for composers. Antonín Dvořák may have put it most succinctly, once warning his composition pupils that unlike the piano or violin, which are capable of carrying themselves in front of an orchestra as ideal solo instruments, the cello does not possess comparable tonal qualities: “it whines up high and mumbles down low”. It is possible that after Elgar’s Violin Concerto (1907–1910), he was taking on a challenge as Dvořák had done—dealing with a difficult compositional task. The solutions the composer selected definitely hint at this. Elgar chose an unusual four-movement layout that differs from most other concertos and is more typical of chamber music, and Elgar’s concerto has a great deal in common with the chamber music genre. The composer deals with the cello’s sonic limitations by using a very delicate instrumental touch, and the music itself is in fact very personal, even intimate in character. Elgar’s musical language achieves perfection in its musical expression of pain and sorrow. The melancholy phrases that descend ever more deeply into despair and gloom are the key to the interpreter’s grasp of the entire work. The concerto dates from a time of great resignation immediately after the First World War. The composer himself was battling illness, but above all he was affected by the decline of his beloved wife’s health. She managed to attend the concerto’s premiere, but she died the following year. Although the premiere on 27 October 1919 featured the superb cellist Felix Salmond, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Elgar conducting, the performance did not turn out well because of a lack of sufficient rehearsal time. The failed premiere proved to be too much for the concerto. Despite the efforts of many outstanding cellists, it was not until 1965 that the work gained wide recognition thanks to the legendary recording made by Jacqueline du Pré, who was 20 years old at the time.

Voices of Life and Consolations
Midday
Intermezzo – Blind Musicians
In the Power of Phantoms
Night

Bohuslav Martinů had known the composer and violinist Josef Suk since the days of his studies at the Prague Conservatoire, and in particular since the 1922–1923 school year, when he was a pupil in Suk’s composition class in the advanced studies course. For many reasons, this did not involve intensive instruction, but the two men were respectful of each other in the years that followed: “…for you, Maestro Suk, I have undying admiration, and I make no secret of this”, Martinů wrote to Suk in 1930. But now we are getting ahead of ourselves. Josef Suk’s standing in the Czech musical world at the end of the 19^th century and in the first decades of the 20^th was not challenged, and his music including the tetralogy of major orchestral works had its enthusiastic admirers and detractors. Suk composed A Summer’s Tale (1907–1909) as the second work in that series, and it was premiered in January 1909 by the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Karel Kovařovic. In five movements, A Summer’s Tale, Op. 29 tends to be characterised as a musical poem (or a poem about nature), and explanations of it very often resort to extra-musical and especially psychological connections. It follows upon the symphonic composition Asrael, in which Suk was most clearly dealing with the death of Antonín Dvořák (1904) and of his beloved wife Otilie (1905). Now—in his own words—after the tempest and the mystical silence of the night, he was clinging “to the tremors of the awakening earth and the rays of the rising sun”. Although these descriptive explanations might seem excessively poetic to us today, the work is remarkable for its intellectual depth and truthfulness.

In Suk’s music, A Summer’s Tale amounted to another step away from late Romanticism towards a modern mode of expression: in it he employs freely shaped melody in the context of expanded tonality, polyrhythm, and polyphony. Tone colour gains an autonomous role, and in handling it, Suk shows himself to be a true master of orchestration. It is no wonder that some critics put him alongside Mahler, Debussy, or Richard Strauss. While Karel Kovařovic appears in the printed score as the work’s dedicatee, the composer promised the autograph score to Oskar Nedbal, his former colleague from the Bohemian Quartet, who conducted A Summer’s Tale in Vienna the very next year after the Prague premiere. In the rather convoluted history of the travels of the autograph scores, copies, and other written sources for the composition, such names appear as Max Švabinský and Gustav Mahler—in all likelihood the author of the inscription “O lieber Tod, komm sachte!” on the proofs of the score from Universal Edition. But that is another story…