Maya Beiser & Evan Ziporyn: Bowie Cello Symphonic
David Bowie would be 80 in January 2027, three months before Big Ears begins in Knoxville. But the shape-shifting art-rock hero died of liver cancer in January 2016, two days after turning 69 and two days after releasing Blackstar, his farewell opus. Clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn was at an arts retreat in Florida when the news broke, and he first thought the announcement was part of a nightmare. “Bowie represented to my generation this kind of model for what it meant to be an artist or creative person,” he subsequently said. As he processed the grief, Ziporyn began to hatch a memorial: he would conduct a volunteer orchestra at MIT, where he teaches, as they played Philip Glass’ Bowie symphonies. Bowie had been dead less than three weeks. When that farewell was finished, Ziporyn began to consider the evermore audacious task of interpreting Blackstar for an orchestra and the cello of Maya Beiser, his Bang on a Can All-Stars co-founder and a commanding instrumentalist who already loved pulling rock songs into a classical context.
A little more than a year after Bowie’s death, in March 2017, Ziporyn and Beiser debuted their Blackstar at MIT. Ziporyn leaned into the jazz-rooted dissonance of the original, especially on the opening title epic, and the heavy metal intensity of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” He ratcheted up the wonderful suspense of “Girl Loves Me,” the rhythms tripping over themselves, and made “Dollar Days” feel like the strangest dream, lush and disorienting. Beiser, of course, took up the challenge of Bowie’s vocals, winding and radiant through “Dollar Days” and troubled but commanding during “Lazarus.” With Ziporyn conducting, they toured these masterful and moving arrangements on several continents, releasing a recording on January 10, 2020, exactly four years after Bowie’s death. Backed by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Beiser and Ziporyn bring their Blackstar to Big Ears, celebrating not just Bowie’s 80th but the extraordinarily creative life he lived.
