The title of the performance, Fragments, was elusive. “What is she playing?” asked my husband, a keen amateur cellist and great admirer of the virtuoso Alisa Weilerstein, before Saturday’s double bill at the Kennedy Center.
“I don’t quite know,” I admitted. “I think there’s going to be some movements from the Bach cello suites, interspersed with some new contemporary works, but other than that, we are in the dark.”
As we took our seats, darkness, indeed, was settling over the auditorium, despite the late afternoon sun that gilded its spectacular riverfront home. By the time the clock struck four, nothing could be made out on the stage except a minuscule, flashing green light, presumably a foot pedal to turn electronic pages of a musical score — all very 2024, but now transformed in the weighty suspense into something weirder; even, perhaps, ominous.
And then, in a flash, there she was, cello in hand, bow aloft, bathed in greenish-blue light; timeless yet utterly of her time, which, of course, is ours too.
As Weilerstein launched into the visceral opening bars of Fragment 4 — they were by Missy Mazzoli, as it happened, but we were not to know the contemporary composers until the end — I sensed a shift of energy in the audience: you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
Fragments is Weilerstein’s ambitious, hard to describe, not easily categorisable, multi-city, multiyear project, in which she calls on other curious, artistic imaginations to explore notions of what a musical and human live experience could be, post-2020. Co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts, 27 living composers are involved, including, in this case: Paul Wiancko, Matthias Pintscher, Courtney Bryan and Gabriel Kahane. As Weilerstein skilfully and with her customary emotional intelligence started to relax into this fiendishly hard music, the intensity did not let up.
There was everything here; sonic colours and textures that brought to my mind a fractal in multi-dimensions: history, future, the now. The sparse stage set consisted of piles of debris, presumably evoking deconstructed buildings and walls. Meanwhile, Elkhanah Pulitzer’s nuanced direction and Seth Reiser’s not-so-subtle yet always effective lighting design — in which the Bach’s warmer hues were pitted against the colder energy of the new pieces — cued a forward momentum, which was often thrilling.
The evening performance doubled up as the second annual Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Fund Award, a reflection in sound of the moral preoccupations with which the late Justice infused her work. A project like this, humble yet bursting with human creativity and imagination, makes us remember the likes of RBG, and think: all is not lost, yet.
★★★★☆
