“What I’m after is how people can experience music on a large canvas,” the cellist Maya Beiser said recently. It is fitting, then, that Ms. Beiser has stretched her own canvas across a vast range of performance opportunities.

In a recital last year at Zankel Hall, she performed works that mined vocal traditions including those from Armenian folklore, Jewish prayer, and Taiwanese singing. In May, she fused exacting cello technique with an evocative taste for modern poetry in a show at Joe’s Pub for the release of her latest CD, “Almost Human,” the centerpiece of which is EveBeglarian’s suite “I Am Writing to You From a Far Off Country,” in which Ms. Beiser recites observations by the female correspondent of Belgian poet Henri Michaux. And on July 14 in Prospect Park, she and fiddle master Mark O’Connor will perform his “Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra” with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

“I’m really trying to keep evolving,” Ms. Beiser, who attributes her eclectic aptitudes to growing up in Israel next to an Arab village, said from her home in Riverdale. “That’s the most important thing for me: to find new connections,” she said. “I’m looking for some sort of totality. It’s got to be about an emotional experience, that place that takes you away from the mundane to another realm. It sounds very abstract, but, in fact, it’s not.”

Ms. Beiser’s willingness to explore has clearly been a draw for composers and fellow musicians as well as audiences. Those who havewrittenforMs. Beiserinclude Osvaldo Golijov, whose plaintive “Mariel” opens her 2003 release, “World to Come.” The legendary minimalist Steve Reich lauded her playing of his “Cello Variations” in notes to “You Are (Variations),” and her musical collaborators include oud master Simon Shaheen and Brazilian world-music star Nana Vasconcelos. And her 1994 Koch CD debut featured the commanding music of Sofia Gubaidulina and Galina Ustvolskaya, whose post-Shostakovich sound palettes ring with steely, searching concentration.

Ms. Beiser credits the influence of one collaborator and friend, composer Louis Andriessen, with her move toward solo performance and the inclusion of vocal expression. “I grew up playing classical music while listening to a huge range of stuff,” she said. “Andriessen was at Yale when I was there, and our conversations helped me to see that deep down — or by that point, not very deep down — I needed a new way of expressing myself.”

Mr. Andriessen gave Ms. Beiser the score to his “La Voce.” “I took it home and began thinking about singing and playing.” Ms. Beiser recalled. “When one plays the cello, this very intense thing happens where you think the note and play it at the same time. You have to free your mind for that to happen,” she said.

In her solo shows, Ms. Beiser calibrates an elaborate effect, overlaying cello tracks, electronics, and backing voices that meld around her solo lines and sustained passages. She also projects a stage presence that ranges from enchanting to fiery. At Zankel Hall last year, she mounted the full production of Ms. Beglarian’s suite, which had been developed in conjunction with Iranian artist Shirin Neshat to involve nine separate video monitors running imagery that included Ms. Beiser herself and, in the cellist’s words, “a lot of sea.”

While Ms. Beiser’s performance with the Brooklyn Philharmonic won’t be quite as visually elaborate, it does promise the adventurousness for which she is recognized. Ms. Beiser and Mr. O’Connor met as the string soloists recording the live premier of Tan Dun’s “Water Passion” in Stuttgart during Bach’s 250th anniversary. When Mr. O’Connor moved to New York City from Tennessee a year and a half ago, he contacted Ms. Beiser in hopes that she would agree to perform his new “Double Concerto.” “The piece is really about the conversation between violin and cello,” Mr. O’Connor said. When Ms. Beiser agreed to perform it, “I was really gratified because it needed someone to be thinking outside the box. The piece has lots of rhythmic energy and folkloric underpinning, and also finesse and virtuosity with big lyrical content that Maya displays with the impact of her playing,” he said. “She takes those passages and soars with them.”