Cellist Gets Up Close, Personal on a Tour of Smaller Venues

With cowboy boots and farming equipment hanging from the ceiling, the Tractor Tavern in Seattle isn’t your usual setting for Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

But the place was packed recently when Matt Haimovitz made a one-night stop there as part of his Bach Listening-Room Tour, which brings him tonight to another club, the Mint in West Los Angeles.

“It went really well,” said Tractor Tavern office manager Sara Green. “We have all kinds of stuff here, but not classical music that often. He was really well received. Absolutely we would bring him back.”

“I’d book him again in a heartbeat,” said Joe Bubina, manager of Nietzsche’s in Buffalo, N.Y., another of the 16 stops on Haimovitz’s six-month tour.

So would Chris Luster, who handles bookings and sound at the Oddfella’s Cantina in Floyd, Va. “What he’s doing is such a wonderful thing, bringing classical music into a place where some people might not even be exposed to it,” Luster said. “The effect on the people in the room was very much like a narcotic--you get swept away by it.”

Haimovitz, 31, is gratified but not surprised. “I think this music is more appropriate in these venues than in concert halls,” he said recently from his home in Northampton, Mass. “So much gets lost in a 3,000-seat space. This is music that is universal. It transcends economic, music and social background. In a 250-300 seat room, people can experience it in a fresh way, without any prejudice.”

The idea for the tour emerged after a successful Haimovitz gig at the Iron Horse Music Hall, a folk-music venue in Northampton, where Haimovitz lives with his wife, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. He tried the program a second time in New York. Bingo.

“I felt I struck a nerve locally and wanted to know if this was something that would happen around the country. So far, it’s certainly been welcomed by the public wherever I have been.”

And it’s been welcomed by critics.

“If playing Bach [at] the Tin Angel was an experiment,” wrote David Patrick Stearns in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “cellist Matt Haimovitz succeeded in ways that say as much as about the needs of the music-loving public as his extraordinary talent. The place was packed to capacity (116 people), and dozens were turned away. Most had never been to this club.”

From Haimovitz’s perspective, mixing classical and club shouldn’t be such a big deal.

“In the classical music world, we are afraid to degrade this music that we revere,” Haimovitz said. “I’m playing the most profound pieces I know. I don’t feel it’s in any way taking away from the music.”

Haimovitz knows the classical world well. A protege of Leonard Rose at Juilliard, he made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 15, playing the Schubert Cello Quintet alongside Isaac Stern, Mstislav Rostropovich, Shlomo Mintz and Pinchas Zukerman. A concert debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic quickly followed. So did an Avery Fisher Career Grant and ultimately a 10-year exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammonphon records. (Six of his discs also won awards.)

“I got publicly categorized as a prodigy and I did high-profile concertizing with wonderful conductors and orchestras,” Haimovitz said. “On the other hand, I never saw myself as a prodigy. I saw myself as very seriously focused on the cello but also interested in getting a rounded education.”

So he stepped back to get a liberal arts degree at Harvard University. He graduated in 1996 with high honors.

“There’s a short memory in the music world. When you disappear for two or three or four years, people wonder, ‘Are you still playing?’ Of course I was still playing, mostly in Europe, during my college years, still with orchestras and in recitals.”

But for a decade, he didn’t play the Bach suites in public.

“I feared not being able to attain perfection, the Platonic ideal that these pieces deserved,” he said. “I had to get over that. I did, by revisiting them, going back to the manuscripts, and by working with modern composers and getting a handle on 20th century solo cello pieces.

“I had to strip away everything that I knew about them. I realized I was finding flaws in Bach--not musically, but finding the humanity of this music. The humor and the emotion in it.

“That’s when it came to me to find intimate listening spaces.”

The tour, he said, has provided him with a few favorite moments so far.

“At the Tin Angel in Philadelphia, there was this roomful of poets. I’ve never felt the chemistry like that; a tiny room. The other place was the Tractor Tavern. It was like a rock concert, with whistling and howling or sighing at the end of a movement. It was this audible reaction now.”

In the clubs, Haimovitz gets a cut of the house or, at the Oddfella’s Cantina, a share of a hat that’s passed around.

“It’s a different economic structure,” the cellist said. “The tour is definitely being subsidized by my concerto appearances.”

Lance Hubp, general manager of the Mint, booked him after hearing a Haimovitz recording of the Bach suites.

“I thought it was pretty exceptional stuff,” said Hubp, who also ran the Troubadour from 1989 to 1999. “I love to do anything that’s eclectic. This certainly qualified.”

Would he bring back Haimovitz?

“I’ll bring anything back that works well,” Hubp said.

Would Haimovitz return?

“Whenever I can, I will be continuing this,” he said. “My real dream is at the end of this tour to return to these places and play a whole program of solos by living American composers.

“I have a feeling that this will take off within the classical world. I was the last person I would have thought able to do this, the last person I would have thought would hang out in bars. If I can do it, anyone can.”

Matt Haimovitz, 7:30 tonight, the Mint, 6010 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. $15. (323) 954-8241.