Thursday, October 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Taking back Bach

Matt Haimovitz reunites beer and baroque

By Newt Briggs

Matt Haimovitz was born to play cello. Even though he didn't even hear the instrument until he was 7 years old, the musical wunderkind was being tutored by the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma and performing at Carnegie Hall by the time he reached his teens. From there, Haimovitz went on to play with many of the world's finest orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris and the Beijing Opera Orchestra. At 18, he also scored a recording contract with classical music stalwart Deutsche Grammophone, thereby cementing himself as one of the world's premier cello players.

So it was strange last year to see Haimovitz sitting alone on the plywood stage at New York's notorious punk mecca CBGB with nothing but his 293-year-old Matteo Gofriller cello and a smattering of microphones. Not surprisingly, it was the first time in the 30-year history of the club that a classical musician had ever mounted its stage--the same primitive edifice that had once supported punk mavericks Television, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. And Haimovitz did so in front of a sold-out crowd--a group that had come not to slamdance but to sit, have a drink and listen to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites (as well as Haimovitz's bone-sawing take on Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner").

"It was unbelievable," says the 32-year-old Harvard grad, whose performance attire typically consists of a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. "Just to see punk rockers sitting next to folks in suits made it all worthwhile. The owner told me that not since the early days of punk had they had such a diverse audience. It makes me hopeful that maybe there's a renaissance brewing in classical music."

Ever since he began his "Listening Room" tours more than two years ago, Haimovitz has drawn a slew of new listeners to the classical genre. Shunning the 2,000-seat concert hall in favor of an assortment of pubs, lounges and backwater juke joints, he and his wife--contemporary composer Luna Pearl Woolf--have been trekking across the country on a professed mission to "challenge the electric guitarist's testosterone monopoly" and "bring classical music back to the people."

"Believe it or not, fine art music really had its origins in the same mentality as the rock band," he says. "Back then, you had troubadours traveling around and setting up shop wherever they could, just trying to entertain whoever was around."

Haimovitz goes on to describe how 18th century classical composers had always relied on pop music as a source of compositional inspiration. Brahms, for example, was infatuated with Hungarian gypsy music and incorporated much of it into his work. And in the 1730s, Bach even led a small band in a German coffeehouse--a place where people could kick back with a beer and a bite and listen to the sounds of the day.

For his part, Haimovitz has taken this a step further, incorporating the sonic vernaculars of rock 'n' roll, jazz and the blues into his performances. He's even managed to convincingly simulate amplifier feedback with his cello--a technique that he says involves "intentionally playing very poorly."

"The best part is the interaction with the crowd," says Haimovitz. "Sometimes I even get audible reactions--you know, a whistle or a howl or a sigh or whatever--as if it were a jazz club or something. People are not as self-conscious as the usual classical listener, so they'll just react. It's fabulous."

Of course, Haimovitz's inimitable performances demand fierce concentration, and occasionally, inebriated patrons can become a bit of a handful. "I've had one or two distractions on this tour during the last couple weeks," he says, lightheartedly recounting a recent doubleheader at an L.A. nightclub. "The early show went off fine, but by the 10 p.m. show, I guess people had already had some drink, and during the performance a kind of barroom brawl broke out. I didn't know exactly what was going on as it occurred, but after I finished I had to mediate the brawl, calm everyone down and then continue the rest of the program."

Overall, though, Haimovitz's quest has been an overwhelming success--if not financially then at least ideologically. "I'd say a third of my audience--maybe even 50 percent now--are people who would never go to the concert hall. And the ones that do go to the concert hall are always grateful to be sitting in company with people that they don't normally come into contact with. Because that's really the power of music, that it can bring people of different backgrounds together to share a common experience."