(New York) When cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM) music director Rafael Payare go to work, they need six plane tickets: one for mom and dad, two for their daughters Ariadna and Elina, one for the nanny, and one for the cello.
Bringing together this famous classical music couple for tours became quite complicated.
Mr. Payare, 43, is in his fifth season as music director of the San Diego Symphony, and he is leading the orchestra on a four-city U.S. tour that ends Thursday at Lehigh’s Zoellner Arts Center in Bethlehem, Pa., and at Carnegie Hall in New York the following evening. Ms. Weilerstein accompanies her for Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, part of the musician’s schedule of about 80 performances each season.
Ms. Weilerstein, 41, is the daughter of Donald Weilerstein, founding first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein. His brother is the conductor Joshua Weilerstein.
She was attracted to the cello when she was two and a half years old. She got chickenpox when her parents were on tour and her grandmother, Lotte Hornik Weininger, created a toy musical set for her.
“She knew how much I loved listening to my parents practice and rehearse, and so she came up with a string quartet made up of instruments made from cereal boxes,” Ms. Weilerstein said. There were two violins, a viola and a cello, and the cello was made from a box of Rice Krispies. The tip was an old green toothbrush and the bow was a wand or stick picked up outside, and I just scrubbed that thing. So my parents came back, and when they were rehearsing, and they put a little stool for me so I could participate if I wanted to. »
When Alisa Weilerstein was 4, she asked for a cello and a teacher, which her parents granted six months later. The family moved from Rochester to Cleveland, Ohio, when she was 7, and at age 13 she made her professional debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in October 1995 with Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. She signed with ICM Artists (now Opus 3) and began playing one week a month with regional orchestras.
In 2011, she won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” being the youngest of 22 recipients that year.
Since 2014, she has played on a Domenico Montagnana cello which celebrated its 300th anniversary this year.
For his part, Mr. Payere grew up with five siblings in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela, and played the horn as a child. He met Gustavo Dudamel, who would also become a conductor, while he was part of the national children’s orchestra. They met in 1995, when Mr. Dudamel and his friends broke the top of a bunk bed. Young Payare repaired it with a piece of curtain, earning him the nickname “MacGyver.”
He first thought about conducting while playing in a children’s orchestra in the late 1990s with Giuseppe Sinopoli. After winning the Malko competition for conductors in Denmark in 2012 – Ms. Weilerstein’s brother had won the previous edition – Mr. Payare met conductor Lorin Maazel.
” I was terrified. There was this urban legend that Maazel was a dictatorial and cold person,” Mr. Payare said.
Mr. Maazel invited him to conduct Beethoven’s Léonore Overture No. 3 at his festival in Castleton, Virginia, that summer.
“He was like a proud grandfather,” Mr. Payare recalls.
Mr. Payere met Joshua Weilerstein in 2007, when Ms. Weilerstein was a guest violinist on the U.S. tour of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, which included Mr. Dudamel’s Carnegie Hall debut. Alisa first encountered Mr. Payare in February 2009 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she was auditioning for Mr. Dudamel, and where Mr. Payare was invited to play the horn in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.
“I didn’t know Josh had a sister,” Payare said. I said, “Oh, say hello to your parents and your brother.” »
Mr. Dudamel asked Ms. Weilerstein to play the Dvořák concerto in Caracas. Mr. Payare was in the orchestra on Dec. 6 for Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, and she asked him to sit in the seats during her rehearsal.
After the concert, they went to a sushi restaurant and have been a couple ever since. Three years later, he proposed to her in her hometown. They were married in August 2013 at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, New York.
Ms. Weilerstein and Mr. Payare own a house in San Diego and rent a house in Montreal, where the conductor is in his second season as music director of the OSM.
Their daughter Ariadna is 7 years old and plays the violin and piano. The youngest, Elina, will be 2 in January. Alisa tried to teach Elina to ask for her father by playing the “Pa-pa-pa” from the Papageno-Papagena duet from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It didn’t really work: Elina calls him “Ta-ta.”
Music is part of the family routine.
“Sometimes around five or six o’clock, there’s always that rush hour where they get a little crazy,” Payare said. We call it hora loca in Spanish. We created a playlist of second movements of Mozart symphonies, and it’s somewhat of a sedative. They always relax immediately. »
