Alisa Weilerstein cello; Pavel Kolesnikov piano

Two artists known for their striking individuality and searching insights join forces to perform works that make a natural coupling. Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata was composed in 1949, the year after he was denounced by the Soviet authorities for deviating from the state’s narrow artistic ideology. Alisa Weilerstein’s reading of it prompted the New York Times to note how she ‘dispatched every technical test with astonishing ease and visceral joy, and took obvious pleasure in the music’s often sardonic humor’.