Beiser-Schick Project Creates an Expansive, Vibrant Sound

Cello and percussion, natural bedfellows? In the case of the Maya Beiser/Steven Schick Project, Monday at the Japan America Theater, yes.

The size of the forces belied the expansiveness of this Green Umbrella series concert.

Sometimes, Beiser sang along. In the case of the gamelan-emulating “Kebyar Maya,” adapted from an older work by Evan Ziporyn, she played over a prerecorded, multi-tracked tape of 20 cello parts, in a house-of-mirrors effect more sonically engaging than musical. And Schick displayed the passionate engagement and the keen, versatile musicianship that has been duly noted at his regular appearances in the area.

Beiser is a dynamo, cutting a striking, kinetic image on stage. She was up to the various challenges of the new music material, leaning into the driving energy of rockish pieces like Nick Didkovsky’s energetic-if-shallow “Caught by the Sky With Wire,” and easing down into meditative states, as in Chinary Ung’s “Grand Alap (A Window in the Sky).” Martin Bresnick’s brilliant “Songs of the Mouse People” straddles both facets, with an enchanted, enigmatic language all its own. The abiding link here was the New York-based new music institution Bang on a Can. Both Schick and Beiser have performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the strongest works on the program were by that organization’s founders. David Lang’s exactingly raucous 1991 piece “The Anvil Chorus” is a tour de force for a solo percussionist: It’s postmodern pre-industrial music.

Most notably, the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s “Close Together” proved a vibrant study in real-time interactivity. The musicians engaged in dialogues, from charging 16th-note piston work to a section that built from a purr to a fever pitch of cello sawing, with a contrastingly plaintive little coda. In the sonic periphery were odd prerecorded samples--the nostalgic crackle of vinyl records, the sound of a CD skipping. Here, as in other works, Wolfe’s inventive mix of live and prerecorded sounds, far from being a merely chic impulse, verged on the poetic.