Weilersteins Show Range of Emotions

In the great nature versus nurture debate, the Weilerstein Trio can represent either or both sides of the argument. Pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein and violinist Donald Weilerstein are married. The cellist is their 19-year-old daughter, Alisa.

The trio made its Orange County debut Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre with a program of Mozart, Shostakovich and Dvorak as part of the ever-enterprising Laguna Chamber Music Series.

Attention immediately focused on Alisa Weilerstein, partly because of her youth, partly because she is one of those musicians actively involved in making music. She registers every emotion physically, with every nuance of phrasing evident on her face.

She bobs and weaves, arcs back into a transported state, draws the music out of her body as if the cello is an extension of herself. She must have a prodigious memory because much of the time she didn’t seem to be looking at a score.

Some might find her intensity hard to watch, but interestingly, the sound is never exaggerated. It is appropriately alive and passionate, but never beyond the bounds of good taste.

You can see from where she gets her expressiveness. Her mother is a physical pianist, one who leans into and away from the keyboard, rising from the bench as she punctuates rhythms. But again, the sound is not out of bounds. It is beautifully calculated not to intrude or overwhelm her colleagues.

Alisa’s father, Donald--founding member and first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet for 20 years--is the traditionalist in the sense that he lets the music do the talking, not his body. Yet there is nothing withdrawn or lacking in his sound.

The three played Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 in E minor with intimate knowledge and consummate expression, almost as if the complex, heart-rending work had been written for them.

We know it was motivated by the death of a close friend of the composer’s, though early audiences found its emotional shifts, from light to serious, disconcerting. The Weilersteins made it all one embracing whole, culminating in the horrifying dance macabre based on Yiddish rhythms.

This is a very risky piece to put on a program. The only appropriate response at the end is dead silence, which is what they got for a long, breathless moment before the inevitable applause.

After intermission, they showed that Dvorak’s Trio in F minor, Opus 65 is a work unjustly overshadowed by his more familiar “Dumky” Trio (Opus 90). The way the group handled the shifts in light and dark in the slow movement alone seemed to sum up a lifetime of experience, while the shift to the major key before the end seemed a benediction from composer to audience.

Father and daughter opened the program with Mozart’s Sonata in C for Violin and Basso (cello), a charming bagatelle written when the composer was all of 12. The three played “Fall” from Astor Piazzolla’s “The Four Seasons” as their single encore.