eMusic Review
The Israeli-American cellist Maya Beiser first came to prominence with New York's Bang On A Can All-Stars, but in recent years, she's focused on multimedia, multicultural concert programs. Provenance is one such live program, translated onto a recording. Beiser draws inspiration from the medieval Spanish court of Alfonse the Wise, who employed Christians, Jews and Moors as musicians, poets and scribes. The idea that disparate cultures could work together, and inevitably influence one another, has resulted in great art (in Alfonse's case, the "Cantigas de Santa Maria," a collection of several hundred songs) whose provenance, or origins, can be difficult to pinpoint.
For this project, Beiser worked with a variety of composers to create works that were similarly informed by other cultures, so that again, it would be difficult to identify the provenance of a work just by listening to it. If, for example, you have spent the last 35 years on Mars, and didn't already know "Kashmir" as an Eastern-tinged, Led Zeppelin anthem, you might expect that it came from somewhere in Central Asia.
Although "Kashmir" was a pre-existing song, it certainly fits thematically with the new compositions that make up most of Provenance. Each of them looks east,… read more »