At UCLA, room for two virtuosos

Sussan Deyhim and Maya Beiser are striking, powerful presences. One is an exceptional Iranian vocalist. The other, an exceptional Israeli cellist. They have a lot in common, but politics and geography had kept them apart until UCLA Live invited them to Royce Hall on Saturday night. That is to say, the politics and geography of the insular New York new music scene kept them apart. The Middle East seems to have had little to do with the situation.

Although both women are longtime New Yorkers and are well known to those who follow current musical trends, they inhabit slightly different performance worlds, which makes all the difference.

Deyhim’s sound blends elements of traditional Persian music, improvisation and techno rock. She uses her own music or pieces by her longtime collaborator, Richard Horowitz, and it is designed to take advantage of her ability to execute amazing vocal cord contortions.

Beiser, one of the founders of Bang on a Can All-Stars (she’s since left the group), is a more traditional virtuoso who plays other people’s music. She often inspires other people’s music, as well.

Grippingly intense as ever Saturday, she gave the first local performances of important and terrific new solo cello pieces by Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich and David Lang that had been written for her.

The UCLA format did not allow for collaboration, and figuring how to make one would have required considerable creative effort. Instead, each woman got an hour onstage to herself (each took, and deserved, more). The solo performances were enhanced by electronics and, in Beiser’s case, multimedia to add a smidgen of theatricality.

Deyhim’s aggressively all-purpose set was meant more as a multi-sided tasting menu than an outright musical meal. What she is best at is extending vocal technique.

When she returns to her Iranian roots, particularly in her collaborations with Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist and filmmaker, she is able, with a single voice (and some help from her electronic setup), to hauntingly evoke what feels like a lost culture (neither old nor new but timeless) as ancient embellishments and modern melismata intertwine.

She uses her voice for both spiritual and political expression, expecting that electronic machines with their incessant need to produce driving beats might excite peace and justice in an otherwise war-filled, inequitable world. But they often have the opposite effect -- blunting her message and making a remarkable voice a trigger for yet one more conventional computer trick that a clever teenager with a synthesizer could easily come up with.

When she keeps things simple and becomes one with her phenomenal voice, however, she is fabulous, as she proved in a final ornamental improvisation. For all the complexity and variety in Deyhim’s art, she still gives the impression of being limited musically.

For that, she might take a cue from Beiser, who is very good at getting a little help from important friends. From Golijov, she got “Mariel,” originally written for cello and marimba but here performed solo with electronic help of multi-tracking. Its melody, once heard, is not forgotten.

From Reich came “Cello Counterpoint,” for live solo cello and seven prerecorded ones. It doesn’t break any new ground for the composer, but its rhythmic intensity and intricate interaction between live and prerecorded parts is intoxicating, what with all that rich cello sound. Anney Bonney’s video, an abstract art ballet shown along with the performance, proved less remarkable than the music.

Lang’s “World to Come” is music that slowly comes into focus. Written in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the composer, who lives not far from ground zero, calls it a kind of prayer. This is expansive music in which melody builds gradually, note by repeated note, until it fills the senses. Beiser’s deep-toned, concentrated playing can always be counted on to enhance the mystical effect of whatever she performs.

A video by Irit Batsry accompanied “World to Come” with abstract images of water. The effect was one of Beiser piloting her cello not on water but within a vaguely watery environment. You never quite knew where you were, visually or musically, but you knew that you were afloat, and that was a marvelously satisfying sensation.