Alisa Weilerstein’s “heroineiac” Celebrity Series traversal of all six Bach Cello Suites in a single span provided both a spectacle and spectacular gift.    [continued]

Cellist Colin Carr delivered Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello in a marathon extravaganza Thursday at Shalin Liu, showing the amazing range that can be accomplished with that one instrument.    [continued]

The BSO, Gil Shaham, and Alisa Weilerstein devoured Dvořák, Brahms, and Stravinsky under the baton of Giancarlo Guerrero yesterday at Tanglewood.    [continued]

After a swashbuckling Le corsair of Berlioz, François-Xavier Roth led Alisa Weilerstein and the BSO in the world premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s hypnotic cello concerto un despertar before the Friday afternoon concluded with a sometime-too-careful Pastoral Symphony.  Repeats tonight.   [continued]

In the final round of the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts featuring all the Beethoven concertos for piano , we heard fine performances of the Leonore Overture No. 1, the Triple Concerto, and the “Emperor,” on Thursday.     [continued]

Thursday’s Boston Symphony Orchestra performance, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting, launched the first of three performances of Beethoven, with pianist Yefim Bronfman. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who would later run into the intermission bar, raise a stem, toast the group, and cheer.     [continued]

What manner of maestro can fill Symphony Hall of a Sunday afternoon with a brand new youth orchestra and give a program of almost three hours to ecstatic and prolonged ovations? These are certainly thoughts to ponder after Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra’s concert.     [continued]

The July 30 concert in the Tanglewood with Christoph Eschenbach was spectacular. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s performance of the Haydn Cello Concert No. 1 was predictably polished, perfectly executed. The respectful, rapt audience in hall and lawn allowed her delicate pianissimos and drawn-out solo passages in the second movement to be savored. It seems so appropriate to call her rapid, right-on-intonation playing in the third movement, “bel canto from the cello.” The performance from Eschenbach and the BSO has to be one of the best I have ever heard of the Mahler Symphony No. 1. It is almost impossible hearing such a performance not to see the creation of the Mahler landscape. The entire mood struck this reviewer as more “pastoral” than that other famous symphony.      [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

Alisa Weilerstein brought a focused fearlessness to Shostakovich’s 1959 Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat that almost eclipsed her accompanying ensemble, though that didn’t seem to bother the visiting St. Petersburg Philharmonic, on April 10 at Symphony Hall in a Celebrity Series of Boston concert. Not once did she detectably slip, and projected all the raw emotion and pained contemplation as effectively as one might wish. Many of this ensemble’s felicities, including its celebrated strings, under Yuri Temirkanov were immediately apparent in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, with a conclusion hair-raisingly effective. In Brahms’s darkly hued Symphony No.4 in E minor, one heard the inner workings of a symphony that is often played surficially. The second highlight of the afternoon was “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations.   [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

On August 13 at Tanglewood Miguel Harth-Bedoya led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in seven short works of varying quality and one flashy encore that wove together soft-edged visual and auditory impressions of the lands of the Incas. Only three made lasting impressions, Illapa, by Gabriela Lena Frank, Mariel by Osvaldo Golijov, and Fiesta, by Jimmy Lopez, which offered real density and juice, and affecting solo appearances by the BSO Principal Flute Elizabeth Rowe and cello virtuoso Alisa Weilerstein. The encore, Ary Barroso and Xavier Cugat’s pop hit Brazil, recalled Cugat’s own words: “I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.”    [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

Austrian conductor Hans Graf led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in glowing concerts given March 19-24, 2009, of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony and the Brahms Double Concerto at Symphony Hall. Soloists in the Brahms were Dutch violinist Janine Jansen and American cellist Alisa Weilerstein, young women of exceptional talent and musical maturity. Both engaged in a good deal of physical body language, with much soulful eyes-closed ceiling-gazing from the latter. More importantly, they also constantly watched one another to coordinate their mutual entrances and handing-off of motivic elements throughout the work’s implicit give-and-take, necessary because of there being two solo voices in this concerto instead of the usual one. Graf skillfully sculpted the orchestra’s contributions into elegant frames of accompaniment. Graf’s essay of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E was tightly controlled and elegantly presented, with carefully planned balances between the choirs of the orchestra. Woodwinds and strings enjoyed freedom to play without fear of being swamped by the large section of brass instruments, augmented here by four Wagner tubas and a contrabass tuba. But was it precisely this constant control that may have contributed to the overall failure of this performance to elate and inspire? [Click title for full review.]    [continued]