Recovering paradise: Alisa Weilerstein on Richard Blackford’s new climate change concerto – The Strad


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2025-02-03T11:16:00+00:00
The American cellist speaks with US correspondent Thomas May about a new work she is premiering this season that hits especially close to home: Richard Blackford’s The Recovery of Paradise concerto for cello, which takes its name from the wildfires that devastated Southern California in 2018.
Weilerstein-at-BBC-Proms-with-Czech-Philharmonic-680x1024
Alisa Weilerstein performing with the Czech Philharmonic under the late Jiří Bělohlávek at the BBC Proms
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Even for an artist as ardently devoted to contemporary music as Alisa Weilerstein, this season is especially packed with major premieres. The MacArthur Award-winning cellist has been unveiling the final sections of her groundbreaking, multi-year FRAGMENTS project, which interweaves 27 newly commissioned works with the 36 movements of Bach’s solo cello suites. Later this spring, she will present the complete cycle for the first time at the 2025 Spoleto Festival USA.  
Weilerstein’s season also includes the premieres of three new cello concertos written for her. Gabriela Ortiz’s Dzonot (Maya for ‘abyss’) debuted with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, while Thomas Larcher’s Returning into Darkness is set to premiere with the New York Philharmonic under Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in early April. 
Meanwhile, on 5–7 February Weilerstein will give the world premiere of Richard Blackford’s The Recovery of Paradise with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague, conducted by Tomáš Netopil. That program will also feature another world premiere – Jiří Teml’s The Labyrinth of Memory – alongside Debussy’s La mer.
Blackford is known for such works as The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony, his collaboration with wild soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, which blends traditional orchestral music with recordings of natural habitats and animal sounds.
The underlying inspiration for the four-movement concerto The Recovery of Paradise is ’the story about how people from the small town of Paradise, California, came together to help those whose homes were destroyed by the wildfires known as The Devil Winds of Santa Ana in 2018’, according to Blackford.
’The cello and orchestra firstly evoke the power of the firestorm, then an elegy for the destruction caused by it, a movement in praise of rain, and finally a hymn to celebrate a community helping those who lost their homes to climate change to rebuild and start again. Their story of compassion and resilience motivates the four movements’.
Fresh from introducing another section of the FRAGMENTS project at Carnegie Hall, Weilerstein spoke about Blackford’s new concerto.
How did you become interested in the music of Richard Blackford?
Alisa Weilerstein: That’s a connection I made through the Czech Philharmonic. I’ve had a very longstanding relationship with the orchestra, starting in 2011 Philharmonic. I was incredibly fond of Jiří Bělohlávek and recorded the Dvořák Concerto with him. I’ve also toured quite a lot with Semyon Bychkov and done a bunch of repertoire together. So we were looking for what we could do next. The administration then introduced me to Richard Blackford, whom I didn’t actually know. But I fell in love with his music, and he decided he wanted to write a concerto for me.
What’s a good place to start to get to know Blackford’s musical world?
Alisa Weilerstein: He wrote a violin concerto called Niobe [2017], based on the Greek mythic figure, also for the Czech Philharmonic. It’s a gorgeous piece I would absolutely recommend.
Richard-Blackford
Richard Blackford
When did you first meet Blackford?
Alisa Weilerstein: In 2018. So this concerto is finally being birthed after seven years’ gestation. We met a couple of times while he was writing it. I like him personally and I like his musical values and his language. There’s a lot of meat in it, and at the same time it’s very accessible, emotional and touching music.
How is that manifested in the new concerto?
Alisa Weilerstein: There is a narrative structure to this piece. Originally, it was in response to the events of 2020, and the last movement was initially called ’The Hill We Climb’, which is the title of the poem Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s Inauguration.
Then the titles of the movements got changed, so they now refer to causes of climate change. For example, the first movement is called ’The Devil Winds of Santa Ana’ and is frenzied and kind of terrifying. It starts with this kind of bang and then moves into a very kind of reflective atmosphere, very personal and vulnerable, in the second movement.
The third movement refers to floods in Calcutta and how they affect poor communities more than anyone else. The fourth movement is incredibly touching – almost like a tear-jerker – with music that’s soaring and reaching. It’s called ’The Recovery of Paradise’, which is where the concerto’s title comes from. I think it ends on a very benevolent and optimistic note, in spite of what’s happened before it – a very impactful and moving concerto. It’s great fun to play.
‘The Devil Winds’ of the first movement refers to the fierce winds that have fueled numerous wildfires around Los Angeles in recent years – including the recent infernos that ravaged the region at the begining of this year. When did Blackford finish writing the concerto?
Alisa Weilerstein: He finished the first version in 2022 and then revised it a bit a year later, adding a couple of cadenzas in the last movement and changing the movement titles. So the piece was done in 2023. But of course COVID delayed everyone’s planning cycles. So it remains very relevant now and, unfortunately, is going to become more and more relevant – unless we get our act together.
I know that Blackford was a student of the German composer Hans Werner Henze, whose political convictions strongly influenced his compositions. Did Blackford speak with you about his thoughts on music and its capacity to engage with current issues?
Alisa Weilerstein: We actually didn’t about that so much. In fact, I had no idea that he was headed in this direction when we first met. He wrote the piece and then sent it to me and said: ’This is what I was thinking. Here it is. Do with it, what you want’. But I don’t want to reduce the music to a narrative. 
How would you characterise Blackford’s approach to the cello?
Alisa Weilerstein: He writes beautifully for the instrument. He’s exploited every aspect of it and is very expressive. So it’s great fun to lean into that. Particularly in the first and third movements, there’s plenty of virtuosity to play with. He writes very fast tempi, and there’s a wildness and unbridledness about it, which I hadn’t heard so much in his other pieces.
This seems a bit new for him. Whether this represents his response to the environmental aspect, or whether it was about the cello playing, or maybe both, I don’t know.
Alisa Weilerstein and the Czech Philharmonic led by Tomáš Netopil give the world premiere of Richard Blackford’s The Recovery of Paradise on 5-7 February at the Rudolfinum in Prague. 
Read: Sentimental Work: Alisa Weilerstein on Mozart’s Don Giovanni
Listen: The Strad Podcast #73: Cellist Alisa Weilerstein on ‘Fragments’
Read: Alisa Weilerstein rehearses Dvorák’s Cello Concerto
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