Alisa Weilerstein: ‘We’re taught that context is everything; why can’t we just skip that and listen?’

For cellist Alisa Weilerstein family has always come first, closely followed by music. So closely, in fact, that one is almost synonymous with the other. Growing up in Rochester, New York, music was a constant presence in the family home, intertwined with almost everything. The house often doubled as a rehearsal space for the world-class players of the Cleveland Quartet, a group founded in the 1960s by her father Donald – who was their first violinist until 1989 – and Weilerstein loved to listen to them play. Her mother, Vivian, would regularly join them on piano, and many of her own collaborators would be in and out of the house. ‘I would often wake up to the sounds of their practising and go to sleep to the sounds of their practising,’ she says. The more dramatic pieces were always her favourites; one of her earliest memories is listening to Mozart’s Don Giovanni with her dad, playing the ‘Ouvertura’ and ‘Il Commendatore’ scenes over and over.

There was no question in Weilerstein’s young mind that she would be a musician too, and her parents let her take the lead on finding her own path. While her younger brother Joshua chose violin, Weilerstein was drawn to the cello. Starting on a 1/16 model at the age of four, she ‘kind of ran wild with it’ for a few years before starting any formal training. Then, when it came time to really focus on her artistic practice, it certainly helped to have two experts at hand. ‘They are both extremely diligent people in that sense, and they instilled in me a great deal in terms of buckling down and building a proper foundation, technically and physically,’ she says.

When Weilerstein was seven years old, the family relocated to Ohio so that her parents could take up positions on the faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. ‘I consider myself more from Cleveland than Rochester, as I remember those years more clearly,’ she says, regarding the city’s classical music scene as pretty much unmatched. ‘The Cleveland Orchestra is probably the greatest orchestra in North America, both historically and still now, so it was a tremendous luxury to have them on our doorstep.’ She considers the 1990s as a golden age for the conservatory, where her parents also worked, and some of her most formative memories are of playing ‘kiddy recitals’ in its halls, almost every weekend.

At 11, she joined their Young Artist Program, which meant attending state school in the mornings and conservatory in the afternoons. There she studied under cellist Richard Weiss, an Assistant Principal of the Cleveland Orchestra whose teaching style she says was ideal for her at the time. ‘I had a lot of inner drive and ideas of my own and was already quite an independent thinker, maybe even too independent,’ she says. ‘I needed a lot of rigour and he gave me very strict parameters, but also a certain degree of freedom, and I thrived on that combination.’ By the time she played her first professional concert with an orchestra, at a high school matinee performance, Weilerstein’s first thought wasn’t nerves but ‘well, it’s about time!’. ‘I was thinking in a deluded adolescent way that I’d waited my whole, long, 13-year-old life to do this,’ she says, laughing. ‘I was just so excited to play.’

A couple of months later she signed with the same New York management company she still works through, Opus 3 Artists, then known as ICM. She credits her first manager, Pat Winter, with having the foresight to place her with different regional orchestras across the US, working with a range of conductors, young and old, and learning the repertoire inside out. It also taught her how to be ‘on’ all the time as a player, able to step off a long plane ride and go straight into rehearsals. As she got older, the plane rides got longer, and her hunger to see the world brought her to Europe. Having studied French in high school, she was keen to go to Paris and try out her skills, only to be ‘humbled very quickly’ upon discovering just how fast Parisians speak. ‘I thought I spoke this language! I did get better at it, but it was a rude awakening for sure.’

Weilerstein’s first time in London, at 16, was particularly special as it coincided with recording sessions for her debut album, a collection of cello and piano works accompanied by her mother. Recorded in St. Michael’s Church in Highgate with Jørn Ole Pedersen, ‘a demanding but compassionate, wonderful producer,’ the recordings were a family affair. Her dad was there too, though mostly minding her brother who was much more interested in building a ‘massive Lego set’ than in what his mum and sister were doing.

Weilerstein isn’t a fan of labels like ‘prodigy’ or ‘genius’, or any kind of ivory tower thinking. When we talk about Bach, it’s not the perfection of his cello suites that she’s drawn to but the playfulness, the emotion and the humour that so often gets overlooked in his work. One movement that holds especially strong feelings is Menuet I & II from Suite No. 2, a piece she was practising at home aged nine on the morning of a doctor’s appointment that resulted in a week-long stay in hospital and a lifelong diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes. ‘I remember everything about that day quite clearly. It was like a meteor dropped on the family,’ she adds. ‘Thank God the technology is much better than it was in 1992 when I was diagnosed, but what we have now is still no substitute for a cure. It’s not easy to have to be vigilant 24/7, 365 days a year, but with that vigilance it’s completely possible to live the life you want to live. That’s always been my message to anyone who’s dealing with it.’

Having spent an hour or so in her company, I get the feeling it would take a brave and/or foolish person to try and tell Weilerstein that anything’s impossible. Record Elgar’s cello concerto with Daniel Barenboim, whose late wife Jacqueline du Pré was the cellist she most looked up to as a kid? Okay, sure. Reinvent the classical music concert hall experience with a groundbreaking new work? Absolutely, sign her up. As a fairly stubborn character myself, it’s nice to hear her doggedness has largely served her well. ‘When somebody tells me they’re not so sure if something is going to work out, I automatically take that as a challenge to make it work,’ she says, laughing. ‘Still now, in some of the projects I’m working on. Yes, those things do sound hard, but just because it’s hard it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.’

It’s hard to come to classical music without expectation and context, especially for those who love the form, but as Weilerstein is proving with FRAGMENTS it absolutely can be done. The first two fragments, ‘Wonder’ and ‘Tumult’, wowed at the Purcell Room earlier this year, and the next two, ‘Emergence’ and ‘Labyrinth’, will be performed in May. She’ll be back later this month, too, for a night of chamber music pieces by Ravel, Rachmaninov and Beethoven, joined by violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Inon Barnatan. ‘I love London so much and I feel really lucky to have this chance to come several times in one season,’ she says of her Southbank Centre residency. ‘I just want to shout it from the rooftops and have a great time.’