Czech Philharmonic • 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.

An inspirational force, particularly in Czech music, Tomáš Netopil was Principal Guest Conductor with Czech Philharmonic from 2018-2024 performing regularly on tour and at concerts in the Rudolfinum Hall in Prague where he continues to conduct the orchestra’s New Year concerts which are live televised. In 2023/2024 season, Tomáš Netopil conducted opera productions including Janáček’s Jenůfa at the Hamburg Staatsoper and Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Prague National Theatre as well as symphonies with Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava, Naples Philharmonic and Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.

Opera productions in the 2024/2025 season include Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Die Zauberflote with the New National Theatre Foundation, Tokyo and Don Giovanni with Oper Köln. Netopil explores a wide range of symphonic repertoire in engagements with Oslo Philharmonic, Antwerp, Kuopio and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Hong Kong Sinfonietta and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. This season sees a welcome return to L'Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo as well as a debut with Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire. Another return is to Concentus Musicus Wien which builds on his work with period ensembles. As part of the Prague Spring Festival, Netopil will delight audiences with an authentic production of Mozart’s Requiem.

Seven years ago, Tomáš Netopil created the International Summer Music Academy in Kroměříž offering students both exceptional artistic tuition and the opportunity to meet and work with major international musicians. In summer 2021, in association with the Dvořák Prague Festival, the Academy established the Dvořákova Praha Youth Philharmonic with musicians from conservatories and music academies, coached by principal players of the Czech Philharmonic. Tomáš Netopil has held a close relationship with the Dvořák Prague Festival for some time and was Artist-in-Residence in 2017, opening the Festival with Essen Philharmoniker and closing the Festival with Wiener Symphoniker in Dvořák’s Te Deum. 

Tomáš Netopil’s discography for Supraphon includes Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass (the first ever recording of the original 1927 version), Dvořák’s complete cello works, Martinů’s Ariane and Double Concerto, and Smetana’s Má vlast with the Prague Symphony Orchestra with whom he’ll become Chief Conductor and Music Director from 2025/2026 season. During his tenure in Essen, his releases included recordings of Suk Asrael and Mahler Symphony Nos. 2, 3 6 and 9. 

From 2008-2012 Tomáš Netopil held the position of Music Director of the Prague National Theatre. He studied violin and conducting in his native Czech Republic, as well as at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm under the guidance of Professor Jorma Panula. In 2002 he won the 1st Sir Georg Solti Conductors Competition at the Alte Oper Frankfurt.

Jiří Teml, a native of Vimperk in the Bohemian Forest region, came to music and to composing by a very peculiar route. Although he had taken an active interest in music from his childhood, playing the piano and serving as a church organist from a young age, the circumstances of his life led him to graduation from a business school instead of musical studies, and he divided his time between musical activities and employment in a different field until the age of 41. Over time, he gained knowledge of composition and music theory through private studies under Bohumil Dušek in Karlovy Vary and Jiří Jaroch in Prague. He developed his composing skills mainly through self-directed study and tasks that he assigned himself. He did not begin working in the field of music until 1976, when he won the position of director of musical programming for radio broadcasts, first in Pilsen, then in Prague, meanwhile also composing. Every day, he was encountering the music of composers of all periods and genres, and he established professional contacts with performers. For a long time, he also worked for the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation. He is still composing today—let us recall the recent premiere of his Clarinet Concerto (2024). He also continues his work in radio broadcasting.

Teml’s style has strongly defined personal characteristics: a natural feel for melody, a keen ear for nontraditional structuring of musical space and for timbral quality, and sensitivity to instruments and the human voice. Today, his large oeuvre encompasses all musical genres, with examples including his three symphonies (No. 1: People and Sources, No. 2: War with the Newts, No. 3: Kafka), several concertos, solo works, and vocal compositions, which attracted the interest of performers soon after they were written, resulting in many performances, recordings for radio broadcast and release on LPs, and printed editions. His works, limited neither by the fashion of the day nor by established conventions, cover a broad range of types and genres. He turns his attention to spiritual, philosophical, literary, and historical subject matter. Teml has written a number of compositions for children including two children’s operas. His distinctive, original music is well received by listeners.

Today we will hear the premiere of the symphonic picture The Labyrinth of Memory, commissioned by the Czech Philharmonic in 2018. The work is divided into several episodes of varying lengths, arranged in the manner of an epic, and contrasting in tempo. The richly articulated musical current follows the form of a firmly contoured arch, beginning and ending quietly. We perceive echoes of the chaotic tempo of contemporary life, delicate colours, both playful and dramatic passages, wonderfully heightened gradations, cries of distress or perhaps even of defiance, into which a chorale melody makes itself heard ever more clearly, penetrating like a ray of light and like spiritual sustenance. In the course of the work, the composer effectively integrates melodic and homorhythmic lines of chords with rhythmically and harmonically relaxed passages emphasising timbre. At the end, all of the energy that has been built up is concentrated one last time into the brief, solemn chordal culmination of a brass chorale that undergoes a brilliant dynamic transformation, flowing into a hushed violin solo that brings to a close the journey through a tangled maze of recollections transformed into music without any hint of nostalgia. For the composer, music is truly Ariadne’s thread, by which his safely finds his way out of the labyrinth of memory: “It helps me, and I’m grateful for that”, Teml commented in one of his interviews, adding: “In fact, the musicologist Jaromír Havlík wrote that music itself literally sought me out, and that assertion pleases me…"

A pupil of the composers John Lambert and Hans Werner Henze, he is an admirer of the music of his compatriot Benjamin Britten as well as of Oliver Messiaen and Leoš Janáček. Above all, however, he is himself a composer of instrumental and sacred works, operas, and film music. This sums up Richard Blackford, a native of London who was inspired to a professional career in music at the age of 15 by attending a performance Berg’s opera Lulu at the National Theatre in Munich.

The untamed and unyielding power of the natural elements inspired him to compose his Cello Concerto “The Recovery of Paradise”. The four movements take listeners to various places on earth afflicted by natural disasters. The first movement evokes the terrible power of winds that contributed to California’s destructive fires in 2017. The composer was told about the traumatic experiences of the local residents by his friend and colleague Bernie Krause, who fled the disaster with his wife Kat; the fire eventually cost him the roof over his head. “We came face to face with the malevolent eye of global heating and its horrific consequences”, Krause later said. The second movement is a lament over the devastated landscapes of California and Australia as well as of India and Greece. Musically, it is built from an elegiac motif for solo cello that gradually builds in its intensity, with calm returning at the end like a quiet, sad echo heard in the high register of the orchestra and the solo cello. The third movement begins as a joyous scherzo celebrating rain as a source of life and hope. Blackford draws from his own recollections of the Indian city Calcutta, where he witnessed children’s joyous dancing upon the arrival of the monsoon rains in 1991. However, both the music and the subject matter of this movement are full of unexpected twists and turns. The joy of rainfall turns into the horror of destructive flooding. The final movement, which gave its name to the entire concerto, tells the story of Paradise, a town in California’s Sierra Nevada region, which has risen like a phoenix from the ashes left by a series of fires in 2018. “[The town’s] rebuilding is a moving story of resilience, acts of kindness and generosity, of a community uniting to recover from a natural disaster”, wrote Richard Blackford in notes to accompany the concerto, adding: “The final movement takes the form of a dialogue between two themes. The solo cello presents the first—a wistful, fragile melody, marked “tenderly”, that spans thirty bars. It contrasts with a second, chorale-like theme, introduced by the orchestral brass, which is expansive, resolute, and which unites all the sections of the orchestra. After extensive development of the first theme, the second returns to conclude the concerto. The cello rises high above it in the closing bars and finally finds resolution. As the orchestra recedes, only the cello is left, softly supported by three orchestral solo celli.”

This is not the Czech Philharmonic’s first encounter with Blackford’s music. The orchestra accompanied the premiere of the violin concerto Niobe played by Tamsin Waley-Cohen, and it also introduced the composition Kalon for string quartet and string orchestra. The first performer of Richard Blackford’s latest concerto will be the cellist Alisa Weilerstein. “I was introduced to Alisa Weilerstein by Robert Hanč in 2018 when she gave a beautiful concert at the Royal Academy of Music, London. I immediately wanted to write a concerto for her and she graciously accepted the proposal. I love writing in all genres but am particularly drawn to the cello, with its powerful, expressive qualities, especially in the mid to upper registers”, the composer added.

La Mer (The Sea) by Debussy is the essence impressionism in its musical form. Just as Monet, Renoir, and many others let themselves be affected by the singular beauty of concrete moments that they depicted in their paintings, Debussy and Ravel as well as Respighi, de Falla, and Sibelius were inspired by the enchantment of nature and of fascinating tales. And in the same way that the famous impressionist painters abandoned the hitherto established rules of their field, impressionist composers also unleashed their musical imagination and let it takes its course, unbounded by familiar forms. Unlike the romantics, they did not seek the most beautiful melody upon which to build huge expanses of music. Instead, they came up with shorter melodic motifs, experimented with harmony and rhythm, explored the diverse colours of orchestral sounds, and discovered in the instruments and notes much that is new, daring, and exotic.

For one of his best-known compositions, Claude Debussy took inspiration from the element of water, which had fascinated him from childhood. That was also the case with artists J. W. M. Turner and Katsushika Hokusai, whose painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa was chosen by Debussy as the illustration for the title page of the printed score. Paradoxically, both Turner and Hokusai were painters of a generation that was older than French impressionists. Debussy had a deep, genuine love of the sea. In a 1914 interview, he said: “I’m so fascinated by the sea that it nearly paralyses my creative capacity. I’ve never been able to write even a page under the direct and immediate impression of that great blue Sphinx.” He could not resist the sea’s inspiration, however. In 1899 he completed a triptych of orchestral Nocturnes, the last of which bears the title Sirènes, and the element of water also plays an important role in the opera Pelléas et Mélisande.

However, his greatest declaration of love for the sea is the three-movement composition that bears its name, which Debussy composed between 1903 and 1905. Listeners experience moments depicting the calm surface of the ocean as morning awakens, the water’s transformation with the lively, energetic interplay of waves, both small and large, then finally the dramatic dialogue of the wind and the sea. The score of La Mer is exceptionally lavish and colourful. Each instrument, including a pair of harps, the celesta, and the tam-tam, gets to have its say and to evoke the mood that the composer wants to transmit to his listeners.

Debussy composed La Mer under rather conflicting circumstances in his personal life. He was divorcing his first wife while at the same time experiencing a period of intense happiness, having fallen in love with a new partner, the singer Emma Bardac. The scandalous affair harmed the composer’s reputation in society and even drove away some of his friends. That this had happened not long before the Paris premiere of La Mer in 1905 may also have played a part in the work’s initial failure. In the end, the work still found its way to concert halls around the world, certainly thanks in part to such famous conductors as Toscanini, Bernstein, and Boulez, who performed La Mer with top orchestras that reveal fully the music’s overwhelming colourfulness and beauty to this day.