American cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s ambitious six-part series FRAGMENTS continues with FRAGMENTS 4: Labyrinth on October 29 at Jacobs Music Center. The 60-minute immersive solo cello journey presents new commissions by Courtney Bryan, Gabriel Kahane, Matthias Pintscher, Missy Mazzoli, and Paul Wiancko woven into and around J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4. These visionary composers, celebrated for their inventive voices, are redefining what classical music can be. The unique nature of Weilerstein’s bold project is that the performances unfold with no pause and no printed program, allowing the listener to surrender to the sonic architecture, responsive lighting and scenic design.

Weilerstein conceived FRAGMENTS during the pandemic as a way to rethink the concert experience. She explains the multi-year project “weaves together movements of Bach’s six solo cello suites with 27 newly commissioned works.”

“I wanted to find new ways of connecting audience with performer, the familiar with the new, and composers of varying generations and backgrounds with one another,” she describes. For FRAGMENTS 4 specifically, the title Labyrinth she gives is apt — an “intricate and searching” journey.

Each installment presents a different side of this vision. In FRAGMENTS I at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, San Diego Story described the event as one that “hovered between a solo recital and a séance,” noting Weilerstein’s “sumptuous yet deftly focused sonority” and her ability to make the transitions between Bach and new works “feel inevitable.”

When FRAGMENTS II followed, San Diego Jewish World called it “a unique multi-sensory experience” and praised her “impeccable playing from memory for the entire hour,” rewarded by a “spontaneous standing ovation.” The publication added that the minimalist staging “added interesting visual dimensions to the concert experience.”

At Spoleto Festival USA 2024, where all six FRAGMENTS were performed in sequence, Charleston City Paper lauded FRAGMENTS 4 for its “fiendishly hard music” and Weilerstein’s “customary emotional intelligence,” calling the experience “a fractal in multi-dimensions: history, future, the now.”

Composer and fellow cellist Paul Wiancko, whose new work appears in FRAGMENTS 4, told Charleston City Paper, “As a cellist myself, I’ve had a lifelong love for Bach… and it was very easy to write from an emotional perspective. Knowing Alisa, you know she can play absolutely anything. She’s phenomenal.”

FRAGMENTS performances are as much visual and atmospheric as they are musical. Audiences are invited not just to hear but to experience. As Elkanah Pulitzer, director for Fragments, puts it: “the staging serves as a way of guiding the audience.” Weilerstein adds, “It’s abstract, yet very, very emotional.”

For audiences in San Diego, FRAGMENTS 4 promises more than a concert—it’s a total work of art. As Weilerstein told The Harvard Crimson, “Ultimately I think this is music stripped down to its essence… just letting the music come at you.”

By Cathy Strauss
October 23, 2025

Photo credit Cole Carrico