The 2nd Annual Terry and Rick Stone Concert will feature a new arrangement by CAST Faculty Director Evan Ziporyn and alumnus Jamshied Sharifi of Blackstar, David Bowie’s last album that Maya Beiser, CAST's Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist, will perform with Ambient Orchestra, a 60 piece orchestra, as part of the MIT Sounding series. The program will also include a new arrangement of Erik Satie's 80 Gymnopedies, inspired by and featuring Brooklyn-based guitarist Brendan Landisand Ziporyn's Frog's Eye.
The concert will also feature a new app called NoteStream, developed by MIT students and Eran Egozy, MIT alum and founder of Harmonix and creator of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The audience experience will be enhanced with the technology as they will be able to stream engaging images and facts about the performance in real time on their smartphones. NoteStream was the subject of a recent article on the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe.
Seating is reserved by section: you will not receive a specific seat number within each section. There will be a number of tickets available for sale at the door as well as advance online tickets.
About the Artist
Cellist Maya Beiser defies categories. Passionately forging a career path through uncharted territories, she has captivated audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. The Boston Globe declares, “With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” Throughout her adventurous and versatile career, she has reimagined the concert experience, creating new music for the cello, commissioning and performing many works written for her by leading composers. She has collaborated with composers Tan Dun, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich, David Lang, Louis Andriessen and Mark O’Connor, among many others.
Among Beiser’s critically-acclaimed multimedia concerts are World To Come, which premiered as part of the inaugural season of Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall; Almost Human, a collaboration with visual artist Shirin Neshat; and Provenance, which forms the basis of her best-selling album. Beiser’s 2012 production, Elsewhere: A CelloOpera, premiered at Carolina Performing Arts followed by a sold-out run at the BAM Next Wave Festival. Elsewhere is an imaginative retelling of the Biblical legend of Lot’s wife, created by Beiser with director Robert Woodruff. Beiser’s latest project All Vows explores the dichotomy between the external, physical world and our internal, private one. It features the music from Uncovered, plus works by Michael Gordon and Michael Harrison, original films by Bill Morrison, and music by Gleen Kotche, David T. Little, and Mohammed Fairouz. All Vows premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in March 2014 and will be presented at BAM Next Wave this coming October.
Beiser has performed throughout the US and at major venues and festivals in Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Torino, Tokyo, Taipei, Athens, Mexico City and Bogota. She has appeared with many of the world’s top orchestras performing new works for the cello, and her vast discography, released on Sony Classical, Nonesuch, Koch (now E1) Innova and Cantaloupe labels, includes eight solo albums and many studio recordings and film music collaborations.
Collaborating with renowned film composer James Newton Howard, Beiser is the featured soloist on several films’ soundtracks, including M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond, Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman and M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth.
Raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee Mountains in Israel by her French mother and Argentinean father and surrounded with the music and rituals of Jews, Muslims and Christians while immersed in the study of classical cello repertoire, Beiser has dedicated her work to reinventing solo cello performance in the classical arena. Beiser is a graduate of Yale University. Her major teachers were Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider and Isaac Stern. Beiser was the founding cellist of the new music ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars. In 2011, Beiser was invited to present at the exclusive TED conference. Cellist Maya Beiser is the 2016-18 Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.
