Weilerstein Variations: Cellist pairs ‘Fragments’ with the six Bach suites

During the COVID-19 shutdown, when cellist Alisa Weilerstein was stuck at home, she had plenty of time to think. One of the ideas that struck her was a project that came to be known as Fragments. 

“Flashes of inspiration don’t happen so often, but when they do happen, they are a lot of fun, and this project was created in one of those flashes of inspiration coming out of despair,” she said from her home in San Diego.

In a more traditional vein, the cellist returns Aug. 17 to the Ravinia Festival, joining guest conductor Joshua Weilerstein (her younger brother) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as soloist in Edward Elgar’s ever-popular Cello Concerto (1919).

Fragments consists of six different one-hour programs, each with one of the six Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach for unaccompanied cello, as well as selections from among the 27 works that Weilerstein commissioned for the project.

“Bringing these voices together and hearing a kind of kaleidoscopic experience, listening to these pieces together interspersed with the suites of Bach, this was something that really intrigued me when I was scribbling ideas down on paper,” Weilerstein said.

In choosing contributors for the project, she spent a lot of time listening to recordings and soliciting advice from composers she already knew. She picked both older and younger composers and put a considerable emphasis on ethnic, gender and stylistic diversity — what she called “very individual and fantastic voices from all different backgrounds.”

“Bringing these voices together and hearing a kind of kaleidoscopic experience, listening to these pieces together interspersed with the suites of Bach, this was something that really intrigued me.” — Alisa Weilerstein

Weilerstein approached 28 composers, and 27 agreed to take part, including Gabriela Lena Frank, Osvaldo Golijov, Missy Mazzoli, Caroline Shaw, Carlos Simon and Joan Tower. There were just two caveats — that each work be about 10 minutes long and that they be divided into two or three movements or fragments that she could intersperse and arrange as she saw fit.          

“I was very up front with the composers that I would do that,” she said. “Every piece is played to its completion, but the second movement might be played before the first movement and might be separated by several other fragments.”

Though some chose to do so, composers were not required to somehow respond or refer to Bach’s music. “So Fragments is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of ‘response’ programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past,” wrote David Allen in the New York Times.

The Fragments lineups are performed without pause and without intermission. No program list is distributed ahead of time. “You sit back and relax and experience the performance,” she said. “Afterward, you get the full menu of everything you’ve heard.”

Adding a further dimension to these concerts is staging developed by director Elkhanah Pulitzer, with set and lighting designer Seth Reiser. They have developed arrangements of what Weilerstein called “lighting boxes” that she brings to each concert, with different lighting effects for each of the 27 works.

She previewed the first program a year ago for about 40 invited guests at the Aspen Music Festival. “I have never been more nervous in my entire life, because this had been two years of creation and having people take various leaps of faith, and, of course, engagements were already on the books,” she said. “So I thought if people don’t respond to it, or they don’t get it or it doesn’t work, this was a pretty big deal.”

She needn’t have worried. Fragments proved to be a success there, and the response has been positive elsewhere as well. The New York Times wrote a feature about the initiative before one of the programs debuted in April.

Three of the six programs have been premiered so far, and the fourth is set to be unveiled in Washington, D.C., in April. A Fragments performance occurred at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., on Aug. 9, and more are scheduled for Boston, Montreal and Los Angeles and La Jolla, Calif., in November.

“It’s been unanimously and uniformly popular,” Weilerstein said of the initiative. “It’s very gratifying.”