Maya Beiser: delugEON
Islandia Music Records

A scan of the set-list on Maya Beiser's latest solo recording might have you expecting a traditional collection of repertoire pieces by Beethoven, Vivaldi, Purcell, and others. Such an impression would be largely wrong, however: yes, delugEON does include familiar material, but it's been so completely re-imagined by the Israeli-born cellist it feels newly born.

As Beiser's projects often do, the recording originated a bit serendipitously. During a visiting-artist residency at MIT's Center for Art, Science & Technology, she heard a ten-hour recording of Antarctic polar ice caps melting, an experience that triggered the idea of merging cello with the sounds of our collapsing natural world. To illustrate, when she performs the slow movements from Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the album's centerpiece, Slow Seasons, she juxtaposes her playing with sounds of melting icebergs (“Winter”), desert dunes (“Summer”), ocean winds (“Autumn”), and NASA-recorded winds on Mars (“Spring”). In essence, delugEON is Beiser's musical response to the global climate crisis, but it's no finger-wagging screed. The message is conveyed artfully and with humanitarian intent, and one comes away from the recording more resilient than resigned.

As important as the concept is the approach she and sound engineer Dave Cook adopted for the recording. Instead of capturing the material in a standard recording studio, the two ensconced themselves for seven days at Hudson Hall in upstate New York where she availed herself of the site's natural acoustics and eschewed artificial reverb. Numerous microphones were strategically placed throughout the hall, and with all of the mics operating during the performances, an effect similar to a multi-track recording was created.

As mentioned, serendipity entered into the recording process, her rendering of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata a case in point. When she found a stethoscope lying about her house (her husband's a doctor and her son's in medical school), she began pondering creative possibilities and soon realizing that the instrument is an amplifier of sorts hit on the idea of working a recording of her heartbeat into the performance. Appearing as a softly throbbing pulse, it aligns itself amazingly well to the work's familiar arpeggios and functions with them as a lulling foundation for her emotive voicing of the lead melodies.

During a stately rendition of Slow Seasons' “Summer,” her multi-tracked cello sings alongside sounds of Moroccan desert dunes Beiser herself recorded; while the rumble of Mars' winds lends a subtly destabilizing undercurrent to the ache of her expressions in “Spring,” her playing seems almost submerged when coupled with the sounds of melting ice caps in “Winter”—how fitting that Messiaen's “Water” (“l'eau” from Fête des belles eaux) should follow. (The piece is perhaps more recognizable as the cello-and-piano movement, “Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus,” from Quartet for the End of Time, but it originated as material Messiaen wrote earlier in the ‘30s, hence the different title.) Carrying on the ‘body' theme of Moonlight Sonata, “Water” integrates Beiser's breathing, which was captured using a retrofitted stethoscope pressed against her lungs. That element only appears towards the end, however, which means the performance primarily centers on the haunting sound of her vibrato-rich cello arcing and soaring for ten minutes. Beiser's subsequent presentations of Claudio Monteverdi's Ah dolente partita and Zoltan Kodaly's Stabat Mater prove as haunting.

The album's settings are largely elegiac in tone, though never depressingly so—even if the title of Henry Purcell's When I Am Laid in Earth (which is treated to a magnificent performance) might suggest as much. Beiser's gifts as a cellist are well-established, of course, but her playing on this release speaks powerfully on behalf of that reputation. These lamentations complement her playing style and bring forth performances of immense poignancy. Her expressions are heartfelt and eloquent, and the control she demonstrates with respect to phrasing, dynamics, and vibrato is never less than superb—all of which makes this an exceptional addition to a discography that has grown ever more distinguished over time. delugEON is so strong, in fact, it comes close to matching the day, her 2018 set featuring two works by David Lang.

November 2019