Provenance

Rate It! Avg: 4.5 (103 ratings)
ALBUM INFORMATION
EDITOR'S PICK

Total Tracks: 5   Total Length: 54:41

eMusic Review

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John Schaefer

eMusic Contributor

05.01.10
Great art whose origins can be difficult to pinpoint
Label: Innova

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 »

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A Steal at £2.10!

CaSundara

I love this album. It's perfect for studying, reading, or just laying back and listening. And it's timeless. Possibly the best £2.10 I've ever spent.

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Provenance

sintovida

It is a excellent album, I am a music therapist and it is very propped for my job I recommend!!

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THIS NOT IT´S NEW AGE

alejandro

BECAUSE IT APPEARS BETWEEN THE ALBUMS IN NEW AGE? THAT MESS OF NEW AGE

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eMusic Features

Maya Beiser

By Jayson Greene , International Editor

"I'm always trying to take the cello to new territory," Maya Beiser claims. Over the course of her eclectic recording career, she has lived up to her word, dragging her cello through the Renaissance and traditional Chinese and Taiwanese song, into collaborations with visual artists and multimedia presentations, through Astor Piazolla tangos and into the 20th-century avant-garde and beyond. Her throaty, sonorous tone, wandering musical intelligence and impeccable taste in composers are often the only… more »

They Say All Media Guide

Taking the well-established route of solo explorations in between any number of collaborative appearances, cellist Maya Beiser continues in her exploration of a wide variety of compositional impulses. The earliest track that surfaced from the album was also the most familiar — a reworking of Led Zeppelin’s stately “Kashmir,” which keeps the familiar elegance of the hard rock warhorse while bringing out the sense of the song’s roots in Middle Eastern musics. Here it appears as the calm conclusion for Provenance, but the other selections are the more compelling as a result. Djavan Gasparyan contributes “Memories,” very much in the vein of much of the Armenian composer’s work on duduk; hearing Beiser apply her preferred instrument to the slow swoop of the composition is equally compelling listening. In contrast, “I Was There,” written by Kayhan Kalhor, balances between a similarly slow unfolding of an arrangement, a sense of a steady muse via Beiser’s performance as well as that of her collaborators on percussion and electronics, and sudden quick bursts of energy, always set against distant sonic textures. The addition of guitar as a counterpoint is a sudden thrill as the whole arrangement then becomes more upbeat and gently celebratory set against the steadier drumming. It’s the standout of the disc as a whole, though the melodramatic “Mar de Leche,” thanks to its guest vocals adding a romantic tinge, has its own compelling edge as well. – Ned Raggett

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