The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 076 Alisa Weilerstein: Artistry & Interpretative Depth

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 76. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope you're doing well. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with international cello soloist Elisa Weilerstein. Elisa has attracted widespread attention for her playing that combines natural virtuosity and technical precision with impassioned musicianship.

Starting point is 00:00:52 A 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant winner, Elisa has collected numerous additional honors, including the Lincoln Center's 2008 Martin E. Siegel Prize and the 2006 Leonard Bernstein Award. Elisa is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, and she also holds a degree in history from Columbia University. Elisa's career has taken her across the globe, where she performs as a soloist with the world's greatest orchestras and as a recitalist and chamber musician on the most famous stages. She's known for her commending performances of the classic of the cello repertoire, and she's an ardent champion of new music. I had a wonderful time speaking about all things mindful practice and performance with

Starting point is 00:01:39 Elisa. It's an information and inspiration-packed episode, and I hope you enjoy and find value in our discussion. Let's go to the show. Elisa Weilerstein, you perform on the world's greatest stages as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician as well, and you've accumulated so many awards and accolades, and I'm so excited that my listeners are going to get to hear from you today.

Starting point is 00:02:15 Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm sure that the listeners would love to hear a little bit about how your story unfolded in your own words. So would you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. I mean, both of my parents are musicians. My father was the first violinist of the Pima Quartet for 20 years. He left the quartet when I was seven years old. So some of my earliest childhood was actually listening to them rehearse in the house and, you know, going to the studio to listen to them. And my mother is a wonderful pianist. And so and she also was rehearsing

Starting point is 00:02:51 with her colleagues and they both uh both my parents individually of course were practicing all the time in the house so it was kind of a full immersion music environment but um the desire to play the cello very much came from me um I when I was around um four I asked my mother uh I want a cello and a cello teacher and she said well you're very young so she kind of wanted to see whether I was truly serious and so I kept asking and then she um she got me a 16th size cello and I started cello lessons when I was around four and a half and what led you to having a professional career I saw that you started performing as a soloist with orchestras from a very young age can you tell us a little bit about that how that progressed to the career that you have today

Starting point is 00:03:36 sure I mean I was I was quite single-minded about playing the cello even from when I first started And I mean, I knew somehow that this I really I really wanted to play concertos with orchestra and to travel the world. And that was always a dream of mine. And and so, I mean, I my parents were in a way very involved and a bit hippie at the same time, meaning that, of course, they were very involved with our upbringing and very, you know, very engaged parents. And yet I was allowed a lot of free reign when I was when I was playing the cello. So, I mean, I had to do my structured practice for like 20 minutes a day when I was very when I was very young, you know, four or five, six years old. And and then I would just kind of bang around on the cello for hours. And I would try to play Dvorak concerto when I could barely play anything, of course.

Starting point is 00:04:28 And I know my position was all messed up and and everything else. And so when I was around nine, I started studying with a much stricter teacher who basically kind of yelled at my parents and said, you know, you can't you can't just let it run wild like this. And so I started, you know, with a very strict scale routine and I started practicing, you know, two hours per day. That was very, very structured. And then I eventually increased that to three hours, four hours a day, a very kind of concentrated practice. And so, um, when I was 13, I played an audition, uh, to play, uh, with the Cleveland Orchestra and I won it. And so that's, that was my debut. I played, um, Tchaikovsky Rokko Cooperations when I was 13 with Cleveland Orchestra and

Starting point is 00:05:16 Alan Gilbert, who of course became music director of the New York Philharmonic. And, um, and it's now, um, I'm about to play with him next week at the, uh, in Hamburg, but he was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra at the time. So I made my, I made my debut with him. when I was 13 years old so after that uh I signed with a um with then ICM artists who's now Opus 3 and so I still have the same manager I started with uh so 1996 I I started my first season of kind of a professional um concerts but I it was very very slow I mean I made I did one week or or or less per month um with uh orchestras that were that were really good but yet not so

Starting point is 00:06:02 exposed that it could have it could have overexposed me and so this was really how i gained so much experience and um psychologically and uh musically technically and and otherwise and that's really how i learned the repertoire those um during high school where i was going to school you know full time and everything else but I was um but I I did you know a certain amount of traveling too to play and I and I really enjoyed that and that was um that was really kind of my foundation for performing I'd love to hear more about this I love how you were so mindful in making sure that you keep that time to have a very healthy progression towards building this career one thing I'm very curious about, and I'm sure my listeners would love to hear about, is the practicing process. You're

Starting point is 00:06:55 also very generous with sharing that on Instagram. So I would encourage everyone to go out there and follow you and watch these beautiful videos where you share about your practicing and so many beautiful movements of Bach. But can you tell us a little bit about that, the practicing process, how that looks like for you? Sure. Although, I mean, it definitely has evolved as I kind of grew out of student years and into adulthood and things like that. But so let me talk about sort of the different stages. And when I was really kind of a student, I mean, and we were talking about kind of my high school years, I would spend, I would spend four hours a day practicing, not more, generally speaking, I found that I was never the kind of person who could practice basically all

Starting point is 00:07:42 day and truly have it be productive practice. I found that after four hours, my concentration is four hours of concentrated practice is actually quite a lot. And I was kind of just done after that. And I needed to do other things to kind of clear my head. So I found that if I wrote out a schedule that I would, it seems very practical in a way, but it definitely kept me in a very focused state of mind so i would do an hour the first hour practice would always be um really about the instrument so some basics like articulation and shifting and vibrato and then scales and arpeggios third six octaves harmonics um and i would spend about an hour doing that um there was a time that i was practicing a lot of proper etudes uh i found

Starting point is 00:08:33 which are super useful of course uh depending on what stage you're at but i found that really long-term the scale there's no substitute for scales arpeggios and and all of all of these other kind of basic work in a way it's more important i certainly found that for myself and then um and then the next hours i would structure depending on what um what i was studying i would spend maybe an hour on the concerto i was i was working on and then i would divide the rest of the time with the recital repertoire in Bach and um kind of what kind of whatever else I I really wanted to practice uh I would always take a 10 minute break between hours very important to even if it's just to walk around and look out the window

Starting point is 00:09:16 uh I don't know have a cup of coffee that always helps right yeah right um you know if you're a drinker you know what just just a chance to put the instrument down and something my father was actually always very intense about um especially during my student days was that i would take i would practice six days a week not seven uh it was important to have one day free of the instrument so that meant also uh structuring the day off so this would not co i mean no rehearsals that day no orchestra no just a day 24 hours where the instrument stays in the case so um that was very important for me and it also kept me very motivated um especially in days and we all have them where you know don't just don't feel like practicing don't feel like we have the

Starting point is 00:10:07 energy and you know where it can sometimes feel like a chore to take the instrument out But knowing that this was a six-day, you know, it wasn't endless, the amount of practice. So that was very important. I love that technique. Yeah. This is great. So you have performed mostly all of the cello repertoire with orchestras. And I know that you're also a big fan of contemporary music.

Starting point is 00:10:33 What does that look like when you develop an understanding of a new work that you're looking at for the first time? what is your approach well it depends on uh on what it is uh in what the language is and that's that's that in a way i i feel like i need to sort of understand before i can really get into the details um for example i mean i i work a lot with matthias pincher he's he's written a fantastic concerto for me and of course now it's played by every by everyone and it's um i think it's really it's going to be a real classic um and and the same with pascal who wrote a gorgeous concerto and I think it's also going to be a 21st century classic as well but those two languages are really entirely different and I found myself you know listening to a lot of their other works

Starting point is 00:11:23 kind of doing some research to kind of understand what really what the language is what it's trying to say and then I very often away from the instrument kind of look through the markings look through the score the kind of uh to understand the orchestration and what um you know the other voices are doing and i even mark my parts especially in some of matthias's music which is very rhythmically um intricate and requires um a kind of mindset and even just writing in very small cues as to what's you know what what other instruments are doing just to really get it into my ear before i've actually even played a note it's kind of important and then, you know, I start going through it by putting fingerings in and, you know, working

Starting point is 00:12:08 through technical things or working through the phrasing and everything else. And, and then it all kind of comes together in this way. A question I get often is how much of the work is mental versus physical practice? You know, how do you spend more time learning a piece musically or physically practicing it to master the technical passages i don't think of it this way because you can ask anyone who's ever worked with me i try to always keep everybody married if you know what i mean so that the physical the technical and the musical uh the intellectual all of this that this the emotional that they stay happily married that we there's no there's no need uh to separate them and one one really shouldn't because if you only practice something in one

Starting point is 00:13:02 aspect then you um you deprive the other and it it means also that once you put everything together everything is kind of just foreign to each other and then you kind of have to relearn the piece all over again so i even let's say we're not talking about new music now let's say we're even talking about you know work of brahms or something like that if i only practice uh slowly and uh when i'm practicing slowly if i practice only thinking about where my fingers are going and not thinking about the phrasing and what I'm trying to say then once I actually work it up to a quick tempo then and I and suddenly I try to phrase it won't make any sense it won't you know there's the I've not practiced for anything really right you see what I mean so

Starting point is 00:13:47 even when I'm practicing anything very slowly or even practicing a very intricate passage slowly I'm always thinking about what do what do I want this eventually to sound like yes so that way once i actually get there that it's something that's just very familiar and i practice it in slow motion rather than just practicing slowly sometimes i call that anti-practicing with students when they you know if they practice uh i mean just give a concrete example if it's a spiccato passage and they're practicing it slowly at the tip i call that anti-practice this is irrelevant what are you actually practicing for exactly yeah yeah you know talking about performing for a second here it's something that I think all musicians I shouldn't

Starting point is 00:14:34 generalize but all musicians are trying to they're trying to feel more comfortable with and that scares a lot of people and it's a skill that you acquire by doing it over and over but is there maybe one experience that you had that taught you something valuable about performing that you might share with us there are a few things I mean this actually is kind of an extension of what we were just talking about really practicing mindfully has helped me get rid of most of the nerves that kind of come with come with the territory because again practicing in slow motion and then working things up to and visualizing the performance space and what it's going to feel like i find really really helps a lot because then you're actually practicing

Starting point is 00:15:16 you're practicing performing if you're visualizing and and um and practicing uh when you're practicing and working something up with the metronome or something like that, and you're visualizing what this is going to feel like to perform with the kind of adrenaline and the energy that comes with being on stage, I find it very, very helpful. The other thing is just practicing performing for friends who know you well, who you really want to play well for. This is much harder than actually playing for an audience of strangers, for me anyway. If I know, like, for example, when I was preparing the Complete Bach program. When I did it for the first time,

Starting point is 00:15:56 it was almost exactly four years ago that I played the Complete Bach Suites in public for the first time. And I asked some very willing and patient friends and my husband to sit down in front of me and just listen to the Complete Bach program. And I was incredibly nervous. But so much so that when I played the first concert

Starting point is 00:16:21 for an audience of strangers, it was actually very easy comparatively. So that I found really helps. I mean, look, even if you need to have an audience of teddy bears or something else, I mean, just practicing playing for somebody, it feels different. And when even that is not possible, visualizing it and really putting yourself in that space in your mind is very, very helpful. I love that you said that it made you feel nervous because for some people, it would be easy to think that someone with your experience doesn't get nervous. I'm sure along the years, you've accumulated some tips. What would you tell the listeners who are struggling with nerves before a performance? What are some of your favorite tips? Well, there's one very basic one,

Starting point is 00:17:08 which is, it only works if you feel like you've practiced well. But so that's why, you know, these practice tips i i hope will be helpful but um my mother said to me once when i was around eight or nine or something and i was performing some i don't know i i did something for my school or something like that and she said you know there's really no reason for you to be nervous because you're very talented and you're very prepared it's very basic but it's and i thought well okay that's actually true i know i've i've practiced i've i have a certain amount of ability on the jello you know i'm always trying to get better ability but i'm okay i'm okay for where i am and i've prepared there's no reason and kind of using logic and reason to get away some of

Starting point is 00:17:56 these jitters which come with the territory it can it can be very kind of steadying and so i've always um yeah it stuck with me yeah it's really addressing the thought that's creating the sensation of feeling nervous. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. This is great. Alyssa, I know you have a performance tonight, so I don't want to keep you here too long, but how about a round of rapid fire questions before I let you go? Sure. Let's do it. Do you have a favorite tool in the practice room? Metronome. The metronome is, well, several things. It's a very good tool when you're working up a passage in rhythms and things like that. And I'm sure your listeners know about practicing in rhythms uh i i use it uh let's say procopio sinfonia concertante is a great example in the

Starting point is 00:18:46 second movement where you have kind of endless passage work and i've you know worked it up sort of from half tempo to to tempo maybe one notch per day just you know so really really getting it kind of uh injecting it into the into the fingers the other way one can use the metronome is really kind of learning how to play uh really learning how to use rubato so that uh i mean of course the metronome shows you exactly what a robotic steady tempo is and then you can see really how you can kind of play still play a very steady tempo and yet kind of borrow time here and borrow time there and give it back here and give it back there so that you actually can have a very uh very structured rubato which actually means much more than just something that's kind of all over the

Starting point is 00:19:31 place and a timing that doesn't make any any musical or structural sense so i've used the metronome in in both ways i love that do you have a favorite book that you'd like to recommend to the listeners actually it's very funny you ask this because i had a dream that i had a that i had dinner with milan kundera the the czech the famous czech novelist and i've read most of what he's written so really you can't go wrong there but i think my favorite of his is the book of laughter and forgetting i have not read this one so i'm going to check it out definitely check it out. Is there a skill that you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments? Listening. Yes. How about a habit? And I'm sure

Starting point is 00:20:17 you have several habits, but is there one in particular that you think has really contributed to your success? Some would call it determination. Some would call it stubbornness. oh i'm gonna have to ask you to expand a little bit on that because now you have me very curious what you mean by this okay well i've always uh if i really believe in something it's very hard to stop me from actually doing it and um i you know it drives some people crazy so they would they would just say that i'm just incredibly stubborn but uh usually if usually when i really believed in something or believed in a project I've managed to somehow get it done I love that also what is the best piece of advice that was ever given to you that you would like to

Starting point is 00:21:06 pass on to the listeners I think it's a very again very basic one that's it's important to be a person first and then everything else comes second a good to be a happy generous human being is the most important thing thank you for that and how about a quick actionable tip that listeners could implement today in their musical lives i think uh again listening listening to as much music as possible and listen to things that you think might offend you i think is very helpful and gets you gets one out of your comfort zone um in terms of practicing uh it's always quality over quantity so four hours or even even two hours of very focused and mindful practice is much better than eight hours of just sawing at your instrument all day

Starting point is 00:22:01 there's no productivity in that so um so yeah let's say two between two and four hours of really focused uh practices um is definitely preferable to that elisa wellerstein thank you so much for this incredible insight today. You're such a wonderful, brilliant, but also really soulful artist. I just adore your playing. And I'm just so grateful that you accepted to chat with me today and share some of your wisdom with my listeners. Oh, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. It's nice to talk to you. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with cellist Elisa Weiler-Stein.

Starting point is 00:22:54 I don't know about you, but I was grinning from ear to ear during the whole discussion. There's so much great insight in what Elisa shared with us today. Among so many things, I loved hearing about how her parents nurtured a natural unfolding of her career and encouraged balance in her life. I think it's so important to keep this in mind. not only for young musicians as they progress on their musical path, but for all of us as we continue on our journey. You guys also know me by now, and you know that I'm 100% with Elisa when she speaks about the importance of focused, efficient practice and of being intentional about managing breaks and scheduling time off. This is so important for long-term sustainability

Starting point is 00:23:40 and for physical and mental health. And I love her approach of learning a piece and what she shared about keeping musicality part of the technical work and keeping everything married. You're going to save so much time in the practice room if you do that. I call it keeping real life in mind. So as not to practice in an expressive vacuum where you separate technique and musicality

Starting point is 00:24:07 and you end up not practicing what you envision as a final result. No anti-practicing. That's one to always keep in mind. Another thing I think is really important to hear is what she shared about how practicing mindfully is the key to get rid of nerves and feel comfortable in performance. As she said, it only works when you've practiced well. And I think we often rely on strategies and last-minute practice, but true freedom comes with thorough preparation.

Starting point is 00:24:41 And speaking of strategies, I love that she was able to use reason to get rid of some of these jitters, addressing the thought that created the sensation of feeling nervous. That's a wonderful strategy to develop and adopt. And finally, I'm a huge proponent of what she said about visualizing performing as you're practicing. And that's something I talk about a lot with my students and my coaching clients. That idea of mentally bringing the stage in your practice room so you feel familiar with the real life stage outside of the practice room. When you do that, the two are no longer so separate and different and you begin to experience more freedom and comfort in performance. So Elisa and

Starting point is 00:25:28 I would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were. So why not share a post on social media and tag us so we can keep this conversation going. You can find us on both Facebook and Instagram. I'm Mind Over Finger, and she's Elisa Waller-Stein. Of course, I'll have all the information to contact us and more details about Elisa's career in the show notes. And Speaking of which, I'd like to invite you to visit mindoverfinger.com to find the show notes, more information about mindful and efficient practice and performance preparation, and to sign up for my newsletter to receive your free guide to a super productive practice using the metronome. Also, make sure to visit my resources page at mindoverfinger.com slash resources, where I've put links to all my favorite tools in the books mentioned by my guest here on the podcast. Finally, just a few words about the Mind Over Finger tribe. This is my private Facebook group where I pop in once a week to talk about mindful practice and answer your questions.

Starting point is 00:26:34 So find us on Facebook and join in the fun. Of course, I like to make things as easy as possible for you guys. And therefore, I have all those links in the show notes. So that's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt. Thank you.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 076 Alisa Weilerstein: Artistry & Interpretative Depth

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