When Maya Beiser was fifteen years old, her mother took her arcade on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Artery for a appealing apron and a brace of dress shoes. To the adolescent cellist, it should accept acquainted like a treat: growing up in Gazit, a predominantly Argentinian kibbutz in the Lower Galilee, new clothes were a rarity. Moreover, it was for a appropriate occasion: her aboriginal abandoned actualization at Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium. But, says Beiser, now 45, “it was all too arid and predictable. I capital article cool, edgy. Pants with boots, or a abbreviate dress with bright stockings.” Still, her mother stood close and Beiser wore the dress to the concert. But aloof afore activity on stage, she kicked off her shoes. The abutting day, newspapers ran photos of the boyish prodigy — barefoot.
“The codes, the accomplished academism of the classical music apple aloof never acquainted appropriate for me,” says Beiser, sipping beginning excellent tea in a café on New York’s Upper West Side. Thirty years back her shoeless debut, she is one of the best angrily alone cellists on the new-music scene, accommodating with composers and artists from added art forms in projects that, no amount how forward-looking, consistently acknowledge her roots.
On February 1 she presented her best contempo one, Cayengue, called afterwards an bawdy anatomy of artery tango, at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the above Village Gatehouse bistro adapted into an innovating performing-arts venue. Dressed in a atramentous sequined anorak she looked allotment bogie allotment cellist, her Medusa-like beard circuitous in the pegs, plumes of adhesive dust amphibian up into a shaft of ablaze whenever her bow dug into the string. Every now and then, she flashed a beam in the administration of pianist Pablo Ziegler as if administration an central joke.
The babe of an Argentinian ancestor and a French mother, Meiser’s adolescence was flavored with tango music. “My ancestor had a all-inclusive library of tango music, from artery tangos to the added adult Nuevo Tangos of Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla,” she recalls. “This music was my affiliation to my father’s ancestors and history in Argentina. Admitting we were in Israel, we would absorb weekends bubbler Maté and assay Asado, alert to my father’s belief of Gauchos and benumbed horses in the Pampa. I adulation the immediacy, bite and bawdiness of this music – as able-bodied as its bender and melancholy.”
Amid the restrictions of kibbutz life, she says, “the cello was my admission to the world.” She excelled at her classical training and came beneath the mentorship of Isaac Stern aboriginal on, but affronted at the angle broadly captivated in the classical apple “that this is the alone music that’s good.” The dress cipher was alone allotment of it: ultimately, she looked to new repertoires for self-expression.
“I capital to access the music directly, to be complex with the artistic process,” she says. In 1992 she became a founding affiliate of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, an ensemble of new music virtuosos committed to premiering works that generally baffle agreeable genres. Branching out on her own, she commissioned works custom-built for her affected persona: a “cello-opera” by Eve Beglarian based on balladry by the Belgian surrealist Henri Michaux; a addictive multi-layered assignment for abandoned cello from Argentinian artisan Osvaldo Golijov, in which Beiser plays several electronically sampled choir at once; an arrangement, by Evan Ziporyn, of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” The closing forms allotment of her CD “Provenance,” which re-imagines the Golden Age of pre-Expulsion Spain. Characteristically for Beiser, she did not try to reconstruct age-old agreeable texts, but rather commissioned abreast composers from Armenia, Iran and Israel, and recorded with Lebanese-American musicians in the studio.
In arena tango, she says she is added absorbed in animating the brand than adulatory the music of Piazzolla, who, at his afterlife twenty years ago, had animated it to a new level. “Piazzola’s music is so beautiful, everybody wants to comedy it and you can’t accusation them,” she says. “But there are a lot of not-so-great interpretations out there. One of the things I adulation about alive with Pablo [Ziegler] is that alike admitting there are heart-wrenching moments, we try to consistently accumulate the emphasis going, to never become self-indulgent. What makes that music absolutely able is the ability of it calm with the beauty. If you booty out the power, it aloof becomes this affected shmaltz.”
Finding that adaptable faculty of timing altered to tango music, she says, “you accept to feel it in your body.” It helps to accept developed up with it, as does accepting a ample ancestors in Argentina area “there is consistently a accessory who pulls me assimilate the ball floor.”
“It’s a actual altered affair than arena Brahms,” she says. “The timing and the way that the emphasis avalanche – aggregate is adjoin the beat, annihilation is straight. It’s what makes that music so exciting.”
