A week ago Tuesday at the Bluebird Cafe, a young Israeli-born cellist played music by J.S. Bach to a sold-out house. This wasn’t the typical setting for a classical concert: Not only was there a capacity crowd, but the show just preceding had featured guitar-playing singers in cowboy boots. For a couple years now, the Harvard-educated Matt Haimovitz has been seeking out venues like the Bluebird in which to play Bach’s suites for solo cello. This is quintessential cello—cello neat. He believes if people taste it, they will like it.
Haimovitz is a classical music phenomenon. He debuted in Carnegie Hall at 13, and his Gofrillo instrument, made in Bach’s time and formerly owned by Pablo Casals, has taken him all over the world, playing the gamut of cello repertory with the likes of Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim, Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. But in this performance, it resounded all alone beneath a neon bluebird sign on a wall papered with photos of country musicians. In well worn jeans, Haimovitz seemed right at home. For two hours, he did cello magic before a rapt house.
That house, pretty diverse, included octogenarians and undergrads. When Haimovitz came out, he said only, “Bach’s first cello suite,” and began to play. Though the suite is divided into six movements, nobody applauded between them. Only after the suite was finished did ardent applause outflow. I was amazed: These were not the listeners who half-fill TPAC; this was a savvy classical music crowd. The only reasonable conclusion is that Haimovitz may not have brought unfamiliar music to his listeners—he may simply have brought Bach lovers into the Bluebird.
For many listeners, J.S. Bach (1685-1750) is the touchstone professional. Though his church job required him to write lots of sacred music week after week, he never ran out of fresh inventiveness. And he wrote secular music too, including scads of suites, among these six for cello alone. Each cello suite is a sequence of six movements metabolizing familiar dances into sophisticated elegance. Heard as a whole, the six suites constitute masterful variations on a simple structural scheme.
On his pub-crawling tour, Haimovitz has sometimes done them all in one evening. At the Bluebird, he did only three, and then for finale his own transcription of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” performance at Woodstock. With a microphone just in front of his cello, he produced an amazingly close replication of the original electric guitar’s sound effects, as if a Bach suite were being eaten alive by Godzilla. The house loved it.
This cellist’s artistry validates his venture into non-classical venues. Since 2000, all around the country, he has been filling houses and drawing applause, as he did last week at the Bluebird. Whether or not Bach filled any new ears there is moot—and immaterial. Some Bluebird listeners opined—rightly—that Haimovitz’s Bach had more in common with Brahms and Liszt than with Handel and Vivaldi. But even these sagacious cavilers smiled their way warmly out into the night.
A sharp Ax
Haimovitz’s Bluebird performance was just one of several recent, and rare, local concerts where classical music manages to hit a transcendent resonance that animates the soul. It happened yet again last Friday night at TPAC, when pianist Emanuel Ax performed with the Nashville Symphony. Ax is a plump, gray-haired man who looks like he might be a public high school teacher. When he plays, he nearly vanishes, transforming into a crystalline medium music uses to enter a listener’s ears. He becomes the music itself—on this occasion Mozart’s Concerto in D minor (1785), the 20th of the composer’s 27 piano concertos.
No ears will ever really know how this concerto sounded when Mozart himself at the piano directed an orchestra through it. We know his Klavier was a much less muscular instrument than a 21st century Steinway. And on a Vladimir Horowitz recording, Mozart sounds more like Chopin than Haydn. Conjured by Ax’s sorcery, Mozart sounded like Mozart—lucid, sane and solid, an elegant marble edifice. This evening’s edifice included some elegiac stained glass, but always suggesting Sir Roger Norrington rather than Sir Elton John.
A Mozart pianist faces enormous risks, whether soaring in lovely melodies, or slaloming through scales and arpeggios where a slip can break a leg. Ax made it all seem effortless. Without performers like him, Mozart would be a black hole. On this occasion, the life-giver was ably abetted by our symphony, led by associate conductor Byung Hyun Rhee.
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