Opening Night / Britt Orchestra / Alisa Weilerstein

Friday, July 31, 2009 • 8 p.m.

Photo by Christian Steiner

The 47th annual Britt Classical Festival opens with a short piece written in 1985 by American Michael Torke (“TOR key”). The composer says, “My musical emotions and impulses were free…the feeling of the working was exuberant; I would leave my studio, and the trees and bushes seemed to dance, and the sky seemed bright blue.”

Next, 26-year old cellist Alisa Weilerstein joins the orchestra. A highly acclaimed artist, Weilerstein was awarded the Leonard Bernstein Award in 2006, and received an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient as an 18-year old in 2000.  Weilerstein began playing the cello when she was four, after her grandmother made a makeshift instrument out of cereal boxes for her. A natural, she played her first public concert just six months later. She often plays with her parents as part of the Weilerstein Trio, ensemble-in-residence at the New England Conservatory. The Weilerstein Trio has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and St. Paul Sunday.

Weilerstein performs Bloch’s Schelomo. Moved deeply by his Jewish heritage and troubled by the agony and suffering that followed the outbreak of World War I, Bloch created this rhapsodic lament for solo cello and orchestra. He believed the voice of the cello was “vaster and deeper than any spoken language” and the cello part, created to be the voice of the biblical King Solomon in all his glory, is emotionally powerful and expressive in a way that transcends words.

Maestro Bay and the Britt Orchestra will close the program with Dvorak’s magnificent Seventh Symphony.

For more information about the artist, visit www.alisaweilerstein.com.

Pre-concert talk at 7 p.m. by Eric Teel, Director of FM Program Services at Jefferson Public Radio.

LISTEN AND WATCH SAMPLES:

Bright Blue Music (audio)
Schelomo - Hebraic Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra (audio)
Symphony No. 7 (first movement) (video)
Alisa Weilerstein (video)