Mexican composer Gabriel Ortiz’ brilliant and demanding Dzonot cello concerto — gaining its San Diego premiere May 9-10 by the San Diego Symphony at Jacobs Music Center — was made for cellist Alisa Weilerstein.
Literally, Ortiz, Mexico’s most prominent living composer, said she composed the work with Weilerstein, conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in mind. Figuratively, the concerto’s ambition, innovation, difficulty and spirit play precisely to San Diego-based Weilerstein’s many strengths.
Speaking from Montreal, her 10-year-old daughter Ariadna within earshot, Weilerstein insists that Ortiz’s concerto is destined to join Dvorak and Elgar’s masterpieces among the core cello concertos. “It’s really going to last and be [part of] the repertoire. I’m struck by how very clear and brilliant her colors are,” Weilerstein said. “Even without knowing any of the social message, it’s so clear what the music is actually expressing and communicating. It’s just a wonderful work of art.”
The social message of Dzonot (the Mayan word for “abyss”) is unambiguous. The mysteriously beautiful cenotes — natural, water-filled sinkholes — of Mexico’s Yucatán are collapsing, partly due to construction. How to musically capture the uncanny grandeur of this unique underground cave system, the world’s largest, and the creatures that dwell in it?
Ortiz’s tour-de-force four-movement score — awarded a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition just three months ago — vividly evokes the interplay of light, water and shadow in the aquatic pits (“Luz Vertical”/vertical light); communicates the cenote system’s delicate ecological balance via its apex predator, the jaguar, embodied by the cellist’s stalking tread (“Ojo de Jaguar”/Jaguar’s eye); connects the cenotes’ physicality — the colors, sounds, odors and shimmering refractions of the cave water and limestone chambers — to the ecologic disaster threatened by the soulless march of the machine (“Jade”); and imagines a hopeful future through the mythological symbol of the Yucatán’s iconic bird (“El Pájaro Toh”/The Toh Bird), incarnated again by the cellist.
From extreme upper-register playing and cadenzas bristling with harmonics and finger-twisting double stops to punishing rhythmic and musical demands requiring guitar-god sawing, percussive bow strokes, and intricate coordination with an orchestra decked out with 29 different percussion instruments, Ortiz imposes every conceivable demand. Her dedication of Dzonot to Weilerstein says everything about the composer’s collegial confidence.
“There are a ton of challenging places,” Weilerstein acknowledges of the score. “Technically, she pushes everybody to their limits, and, sort of tongue in cheek, I think she enjoys that. She likes to take players out of their comfort zone. So, I had to really take my time with it, learn it, feel it was fully internalized. It’s very virtuosic — you’ll see.”
Just as Dzonot is about much more than its environmental message — it’s also an evocation of sacred nature and a paean to Mexico’s richness — so its score is much more than a showpiece of wizardly orchestration. As Weilerstein found the human soul at the heart of Unsuk Chin’s unhuggable cello concerto last May, so her 2024 recording of Dzonot continually injects lyrical warmth and emotional accessibility into Ortiz’s potentially abstract ecological sound world. Take her suspended, dissolving cantabile lines in the first movement, the “feral elegance” (Andrew Farach-Colton’s words) she brings to the second movement, or her soaring, long-breathed phrasing in the finale.
While acknowledging that a piece’s intent or message is “extremely important,” when championing new music Weilerstein focuses on something else: “I look for great music that speaks, in my view, more deeply than any one message. I think that [Dzonot] speaks to more universal messages, about bringing us together as human beings and connecting us. That’s what I look for, something that I connect to.”
Weilerstein’s career-long promotion of new music like Dzonot is no judgment on the core concerto repertoire. “The so-called standard repertoire for cello is very small, five, maybe seven, very beloved cello concertos,” she said. “They’re beloved for a reason. They’re masterpieces. I will never get tired of them. But I’m very restless.”
She sees the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (for whom she once played at age 21) as a role model for the cellist who honors the core repertoire while never ignoring the music of his own time. “He’s a great example for me to remain curious and to develop relationships with composers of our time, to really create a solid twenty-first-century repertoire,” she said.
That interest in new music always involves risk. “You’re approaching a score that’s never been touched by anyone. It involves a tremendous amount of trust,” said Weilerstein, noting thate the composer “has to trust me to bring it to life, to do well by it, to devote time and care to it. From my side, I have no idea what [the composer] is going to actually do, what direction she is going to go in. There is the risk that maybe I’ve completely misinterpreted what she wanted or don’t get the language or whatever. Thank God that was not the case here . She was happy.”
Indeed, a video exists of Ortiz telling Weilerstein after Dzonot’s first rehearsal the words every first-performer longs to hear: “I heard things that, honestly, sounded better than what I had in my head.”
But even for Weilerstein, there’s a limit to how much new music she embraces. In 2025, she premiered three new concertos (Dzonot, Thomas Larcher’s Returning into Darkness, and Richard Blackford’s The Recovery of Paradise), and for her groundbreaking multimedia FRAGMENTS project she premiered another fifteen shorter pieces by prominent composers to connect Bach’s cello suites.
“It culminated in my doing the complete FRAGMENTS project, which is six hours of music, at the Spoleto Festival USA in one week. Three of the programs were being played for the first time. It was kind of insane,” she recalled. “There’s a little bit of a breather between this explosion of commissions.” But, she quickly adds, “I’m happy to say I’m going to give the European premiere of the Wynton Marsalis concerto this November.”
With the May 9 -10 performances of Dzonot (only the eighth and ninth ever worldwide), San Diegans can feast on a true meeting of minds between a composer and musician who place rhythm at the very center of their music-making.
““If somebody speaks to you with just total emotion … you won’t even understand what they’re saying. Rhythm is what gives everything structure, emotion and purpose,” Weilerstein explained. “Think about pieces that truly move you and make sense at the same time. The rhythm gives it. You have to know where the phrase is beginning and where is the peak and valley. That’s rhythm.”
But investing emotionally in music is not one of Weilerstein’s concerns. In performing a piece, “there are many things I have to think about, but that’s one I don’t have to think about. Music always hits me in a very visceral way. Expressing that, channeling that, has been my life challenge, marrying heart and head. This is what I always work on with anything that I’m shaping for the first time. But emotional investment happens quite naturally — automatically.”
