The young American cellist has won unanimous praise for playing that combines natural virtuosity with impassioned musicianship. The New York Times called her “an enormously talented musician” whose performance of a Dvorak cello concerto featured “boldness, assured technique and vibrant tone.”

Born in 1982, she began playing the cello at age four and a half. She performed her first public concert six months later. A student of Richard Weiss, she is a member of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Weilerstein made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in October 1995 at age 13, playing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. She first appeared at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony in March 1997 and also has given concerts with the Albany Symphony, the California Symphony, the Puerto Rico Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic.

During the 1997-98 season, Weilerstein returned to the Rochester Philharmonic and made debuts with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra under Lawrence Foster’s direction and the Long Island Philharmonic. During the last two summers, she participated in the Verbier Festival in Switzerland and also made her recording debut in London with a recital album for EMI Classics.

Weilerstein also has performed at the Cleveland Museum of Art, as part of the young artists recital series of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society in San Diego and the Ravinia Festival. During her first tour to Japan in 1999, she gave a Suntory Hall recital in Tokyo in 1999.

Weilerstein plays regularly throughout the country with her parents, Donald and Vivian, as the Weilerstein Trio. She first performed with them at age 6 at the Round Top Festival in Texas. Since then, the trio has performed in Akron, Cleveland, Chicago and Toronto, as well as the Eastman School of Music and the Aspen Music Festival. They recorded their debut CD, The Ives Piano Trio, in 1998.

Alisa Weilerstein has played for many musicians including Yo-Yo Ma, David Finckel, Paul Katz, Lynn Harrell and Dorothy DeLay. She was profiled in 1998 by CBS This Morning as part of its nationally televised series on the “Class of 2000.”

The next concert in the Bates College Concert Series will be Shanghai String Quartet and Eliot Fisk, guitar, who will perform at 8 p.m., Monday, Feb. 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Tickets for this concert are also $10 for general admission and $8 for students and seniors and may be purchased by calling 207-786-6252.

The concert includes two pieces by New York composer Beth Anderson. Composed during the mid-1960s, “Valid for Life” is a graphic score for four performers, making long, low rolling sounds with soft beaters on pianos and drums, accompanied by loudspeaker sounds.

Anderson’s second piece “Minnesota Swale” is “tuneful and beautiful,” Matthews said, composed in the 1980s after the composer’s style had changed completely, and includes a “klezmer-style clarinet solo as well as a number of memorable melodies.” According to Anderson, “a swale is a meadow or a marsh where a lot of wild things grow together. It is a good name for a musical collage of newly composed materials.”

The program also includes Franz Joseph Haydn’s 1788 Symphony #90 in D minor and Dimitri Kabalevski’s “Violin Concerto,” composed in 1940 and dedicated to Soviet Youth. “It’s remarkably perky and cheerful, given its historical context,” Matthews said. Bates senior Jennifer Winslow of Lee, N.H., will perform the solo.

For additional information, call the Olin Arts Center at 207-786-6135.

Written when the composer was only 18, Schubert’s work “represents a different way of writing a symphony from Beethoven’s ‘Fifth‘,” said Matthews, the college’s Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music. “Beethoven’s work is huge, virile and motive-driven, while Schubert’s is a tuneful, gentle approach.”

Soprano Elaine Chow, a Bates senior from Oklahoma City, Okla., will join the orchestra for a solo performance of Copland’s song cycles, a union of the composer’s music and some of the poet’s greatest verses.

For additional information, call the Olin Arts Center at 207-786-6135.

Critically acclaimed for their ability to connect reggae’s rich and spiritual heritage with today’s music, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers have carried on their father Bob Marley’s legacy of delivering stirring roots music as well as offering up a dizzying array of other styles and influences in the seven recordings they have released since the mid-1980s.

The doors will open at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at all Strawberries locations; Bull Moose Records in Brunswick, Windham and Portland; Good Vibrations in Augusta; Sound Source in Bangor; Play It Again in Yarmouth; Dr. Records in Orono; and Record and CD Exchange in Portland. If not sold out, tickets will be available at the door.

The Marley lineup includes Ziggy, brother Stephen and sisters Cedella and Sharon along with other family members. The Melody Makers’ latest album, Free Like We Want 2 Be (1995), recorded in their father’s remodeled old Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica (where he recorded many of his classics), strikes a balance between their two earlier hit albums, Conscious Party (1988) and One Bright Day (1989).

As storytellers and musicians since adolescence, the Melody Makers have often held to the original delivery of Jamaican patois, but have also learned to echo the characteristics of today’s reggae and R&B scenes. Their last two albums, both self-produced, showcased the group’s experiments with the hip-hop tinged Jahmekya (1991) and the more roots-driven Joy and Blues (1993).

With the group’s latest release, Ziggy Marley said: “I think in the beginning, when we started out, people could only see us in my father’s shadow. I think with each album they sensed that we had something unique to say, that we continue to grow.”

The Melody Makers, cited on many occasions for their contribution to social and political awareness, including an award from the United Nations, have explored a variety of ways to effect change, including communicating on the Internet. “I’m realizing that communicating in this way can be just like music. You can communicate truth through it. We can change the world on-line,” he said.