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RECITAL REVIEW
January 11, 2004
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By Scott MacClelland
The cellist Maya Beiser, who performed Sunday at the UC Santa Cruz music hall, enjoys an enviable position in the world of new classical music: too few such specialists; too much new music. Yo Yo Ma, also to be counted a new music aficionado, has plenty on his plate. Most other prominent cellists seem content with rehashing the standard and familiar repertory.
Whether Beiser, an erstwhile member of New York's avant-garde Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, can survive as a solo artist is not certain. Clearly however, she has attracted some of the best and brightest composing talent currently available. Her short program — ninety minutes including intermission — was titled after its longest piece, David Lang's World To Come. It also contained an important commissioned work by Steve Reich and a heartfelt, even inspired, piece by Osvaldo Golijov, the Argentine composer whose St. Mark Passion of 2000 has attracted international success and acclaim. Arvo Pärt's ‘greatest hit,' Fratres, opened the program, and an imaginative work by Louis Andriessen opened the second half.
Beiser, who grew up on an Israeli kibbutz and studied with Aldo Parisot, Alexander Schneider and Isaac Stern, is neither a brilliant performer nor compelling artistic personality on stage. She skillfully masked these limitations behind amplification, electronically-enhanced reverberation, multiple layers of herself previously recorded, and fast-moving visual images projected large on the wall behind her. In most cases, her actual, live playing was, in terms of cello technique, pretty simple, but not flawless.
The Pärt, whose arranged versions for all manner of instrumentations are now running a close second to the much-molested Pictures at an Exhibition, opened with Beiser playing harmonics live over prerecorded tracks that were notably more room-filling through the hall's sound system. (Harmonics, achieved by lightly touching the strings at crucial “nodes,” are tough to control anyway, and this was no exception.) The “bed” of prerecorded tracks in Golijov's Mariel, a memorial to a friend who died young, supported a haunting, lyrical cantilena flavored with Brazilian inflections. Steve Reich's Cello Counterpoint of 2003, here getting its West Coast premiere, deserves special notice. The composer confesses to the difficulty he had writing it, adding that, despite its contrapuntal complexity, it is “the freest in structure of any I have ever written.” That may explain why it sounded more like John Adams' brand of minimalism, more impulsive than compulsive, more spontaneous than controlled. Composed originally for live solo and pre-recorded tracks, it made the most convincing case for such “instrumentation” of anything on Beiser's program. Andriessen's La Voce, based on a poem by Cesare Pavese (and played before a static projection of a large empty room) called for Beiser to recite the Italian verses and vocalize as she variously stroked and hammered her instrument. At the start, the score called for her to silently bow the air above the strings. In the 25-minute piece by Lang (a Bang-On-A-Can colleague) the impression was one of tape loops being created on stage, then played back through speakers as Beiser added a new live voice in counterpoint. However, after the initial material was presented, Beiser seemed confused as to when to add the next lines, trying to jump in two or three times before actually putting bow to string. The original material consisted of a rising arpeggio, played in ostinato, plus much obsessing on single tones. About his piece, composed after 9/11, Lang writes, World to Come is a kind of prayer… a meditation on hope and hopelessness, asking fundamental questions about the death and life of the soul.” The work gave little for the intellect to engage, and depended heavily on amplified, atmospheric sonorities to make its point. Existential for the above reasons, but not memorable. Nevertheless, the piece as project evidently proved attractive to foundations; no fewer than seven institutions contributed funds to the commission: UC Santa Cruz, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Krannert Center for Performing Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, On the Boards, and Connecticut College.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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