It's a barn. The Palms—a
legendary music venue in Davis, California—is exactly that,
a barn: a creaky, wooden structure with a soaring roof, knotty walls,
and corrugated-tin siding. A ruined tractor sits rusting in the
dirt outside the massive main entrance. The interior—noisy
with preshow chatter—is decorated with horseshoes and pictures
of boots, and holds about 125 folding wooden seats, all facing a
tiny fabric-backed stage. Two barn doors, on either side of the
building, stand wide open, allowing a gentle breeze—refreshingly
cool and long-overdue—to blow in across the wilting audience;
though it's just before sunset, the rural town of Davis—located
11 miles west of Sacramento, in the middle of California's sweltering
Central Valley—is still a hot-and-sticky 80 degrees.
It's even warmer inside
where the music is.
Primarily identified
with such folk and traditional acts as fiddlers Laurie Lewis and
Sourdough Slim, the Palms is playing host tonight to renowned 32-year-old
cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Israeli-born wunderkind who's earned
a reputation as one of the most exciting, unpredictable classical
musicians to grace the concert halls of the world—or for that
matter, the barns of California. Tonight, he's performing the first
three suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The place is packed.
"This is a treat, to
have such a turnout," says the ponytailed, casually dressed Haimovitz,
addressing the mesmerized crowd between the first and second suites.
"Thanks to the Palms for trying something different . . . and thanks
to you for welcoming the Bach."
If an overheated cow
house seems an unlikely location in which to hear the music of Bach,
just consider the venue Haimovitz played two nights earlier. The
Mint, a fabled rock 'n' roll supper club in a rough neighborhood
of Los Angeles dotted with tattoo parlors, was similarly sold out
when Haimovitz played the Bach suites, as the opening act for scary
Irish Goth-rocker Noella Hutton. Previous to that gig, Haimovitz
played for the beautiful people at Club Passim, a veggie-burger
coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Ram's Head Tavern in
Annapolis; the Tin Angel in Philadelphia, and a place called Oddfella's
Cantina in Floyd, Virginia. While certainly not Carnegie Hall—Haimovitz
played that at age 13—such pointedly nonclassical venues are
exactly the point of this unusual cross-country tour, which Haimovitz
has playfully dubbed the Bach Listening Room Tour.
It all began a couple
of years ago, after Haimovitz recorded a three-CD set of all six
Bach cello suites (Oxingale Records OX2000). As an experiment, he
staged a performance at Joe's Pub, near his home in Northampton,
Massachusetts, playing all six suites. The response was electric.
"I felt like I'd struck a nerve," Haimovitz says, gobbling a cheeseburger
at an In-N-Out Burger after the Palms show, while his 292-year-old
Matteo Goffiller cello takes up an entire seat beside him. "I started
wondering if there was a need for this in other parts of the country."
While the settings he
chooses are certainly unconventional for a classical performer,
what's equally jarring about them is Haimovitz' laid-back demeanor
during the shows. In a concert hall, a musician would rarely dare
to chat up his audience between musical selections, tell jokes,
share personal insights, or offer Henry Kissinger impersonations.
Haimovitz does it all. And it's all part of his plan to break up
the routine that distances so many people from classical music—the
very same people who show up to hear Haimovitz play Bach in a barn
or a rock club or the neighborhood bar.
"Bach did not write
for the music hall," says Haimovitz, "Bach wrote for people. Musically,
I'm not sacrificing a single thing. I'm not taking out a single
repeat. I may be taking Bach out of the concert hall, but I'm certainly
not dumbing him down or selling him out."
On the contrary, and
to his agent's chagrin, Haimovitz could be making a lot more money
playing in the traditional halls, instead of tooling around the
country in his hybrid-electric car, playing tiny taverns, and selling
CDs out of his trunk. "For me," he explains, "this is not only a
musical adventure—it's a life adventure. By taking these pieces
into these odd venues, I am finding new meanings in the music in
each place I play. I feel like I'm getting closer to the core spontaneity
of Bach."
He may also be starting
a revolution; with the success and popularity and national press
attention his appearances have garnered, there is talk that other
major classical musicians may be planning to try the same thing.
Haimovitz hopes it happens. "The problem with classical music,"
he says, "is this fear we all have of degrading beautiful music.
But if you are open to it, not only do you not degrade the music,
you end up honoring it."
