"God, that sucked," "Fucking brilliant," and "What was that?" were just some of reactions I overheard after cellist Maya Beiser's performance at On the Boards in January 2004.

Mixed—and rabid—reactions signal a successful show or at least imply a brave, risk-taking approach. At On the Boards, Beiser gave a bracing, ass-kicking performance of Steve Reich's Cello Counterpoint, along with works by David Lang, Arvo Pärt, and Dutch aggro-minimalist Louis Andriessen. A former mainstay of the New York composers collective Bang on a Can All-Stars, Beiser continues to champion new music for solo cello.

"I'm always looking for new sounds on the cello," states Beiser by phone from New York. For this return visit, the cellist has lined up a slew of pieces that include video and live electronics: Joby Talbot's Motion Detector for cello, sampled chorus, and live electronics (2006), "Feige/Antiphonal Song: A Duet for Cello and Video" (2003) by Tan Dun, and Michael Gordon's "Light Is Calling" (2006). For those tired of concerts with a token piece of new music, it's refreshing that the oldest work on the program, Chinary Ung's funereal "Khse Buon," was written in 1980.

The centerpiece of the concert is Eve Beglarian's epic I Am Writing to You from a Far-Off Country from her forthcoming CD Almost Human (Koch). "It's based on Armenian folk songs," explains Beiser. "I recite a text by Belgian surrealist Henri Michaux. I play lyrical lines on the cello, but there's more—Hendrix-like distortion and drumming on the cello's body while nine video monitors show images by Shirin Neshat." For Beiser, technology is not an end in itself. "I want to expand what the cello can do. Everything is about the music."