Elgar and Carter Cello Concertos – Weilerstein

There is a particular hazard that comes with recording the Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor, op. 85, one that has nothing to do with craft and everything to do with ghosts. Every cellist who takes up this score signs an invisible contract with Jacqueline du Pré, whether she wants to or not. Alisa Weilerstein knew this going in — she has said as much, having absorbed du Pré’s various recordings since childhood, practically as scripture — and to her enormous credit, she does not spend these twenty-nine minutes trying to escape that shadow. She walks straight into it.

What she finds there is her own voice, thank goodness, weathered and dark and occasionally raw in ways du Pré’s silken tone rarely was. The opening declamation — those four bars of double- and triple-stopped recitative that Elgar marks Moderato and that every cellist since 1919 has had to somehow make sound both improvised and inevitable — arrives here bruised rather than grand. Weilerstein digs into the string, lets the bow catch and rasp slightly at the frog. It is not a luminous sound, exactly. It is a true one.

Daniel Barenboim conducts, and this matters enormously. He was, after all, married to du Pré when she made the Barbirolli recording’s slightly less celebrated but arguably more harrowing sibling — his own 1970 traversal with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a reading that still unsettles listeners who stumble on it. Barenboim knows this concerto from the inside, knows where Elgar hid the trapdoors, and here with the Staatskapelle Berlin he gives Weilerstein a bed of sound that breathes with her rather than under her. The Allegro molto second movement, that skittering moto perpetuo that so many performances render merely brilliant, has genuine anxiety in it — you can hear the players listening hard, adjusting.

The slow movement is where this recording earns its keep. Elgar’s Adagio is barely five minutes on paper and an eternity in performance if a cellist doesn’t trust the silences. Weilerstein trusts them. There’s a sustained G here, well past the two-minute mark, where she simply lets the note decay into the hall — you can practically hear the Philharmonie’s air moving — before Barenboim brings the strings back under her, pianissimo, like a tide returning. Du Pré’s version of this movement remains, for me, unimprovable in its naked grief. Weilerstein’s is different: less confessional, more interior, a private diary rather than a cry across a chasm. Both readings are valid. That is not a small thing to say about a nearly sixty-year-old recording’s competition.

The finale gives some trouble. Elgar’s tendency toward rhetorical excess — those grand pauses, the return of the opening recitative near the close, weighted now with everything that has come before — occasionally outpaces Weilerstein’s ability to sustain tension across the movement’s oddly episodic structure. A few transitions feel driven rather than discovered. Small complaint, in the scheme of things.

Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto, written when the composer was in his nineties and staring down another decade of composition with characteristic disdain for retirement, could not sit further from Elgar’s late-Romantic autumn. Carter’s is spiky, athletic, almost aggressively unsentimental — the soloist in constant negotiation with an orchestra that keeps changing the terms of the argument. Weilerstein, who premiered nothing here but clearly has the piece in her bones, navigates its rhythmic thickets — those cross-rhythms Carter loved, layering 4 against 5 against 7 as casually as most composers write scales — with an alertness that never curdles into mere note-accuracy. She makes it sound urgent rather than academic, which is Carter’s own highest compliment, delivered posthumously.

Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, op. 47, closes the disc as a kind of exhale — ten minutes of unabashed, cantorial melancholy that some critics dismiss as salon music with a yarmulke on. I’ve never agreed. Weilerstein plays it without apology, vibrato wide and warm, phrasing it the way a good cantor would, with rubato that breathes rather than sags.

This is, all told, an auspicious disc debut — one that doesn’t try to dethrone du Pré (a fool’s errand) but stakes its own claim beside her, imperfect in places, alive throughout. Decca has served Weilerstein well. I suspect we’ll be listening to her Elgar for decades.