Oxingale Music

December 2015

The cutting-edge cellist finds himself returning back to Bach.

It’s 7:30 on a balmy spring weeknight at Crown Station Pub in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the intimate club is filling with people finding seats and ordering beer. All attention focuses on the low riser at the end of the bar, where instead of the pub’s usual bill of folk or rock musicians, solo cellist Matt Haimovitz is seated. Seeming to merge with his instrument, Haimovitz skates his bow across the 1710 Goffriller’s strings as the warm, mellifluous tones of J. S.  Bach’s Suite No. 2 in D minor radiates from the stage and envelops the rapt audience.

Using Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello as his vehicle, Haimovitz, 44, pioneered bringing classical music out of the concert halls and into clubs back in 2000. Now, Haimovitz is going back to the barrooms, and the Bach, that earned him notoriety 15 years ago.

“There’s such a rich, complete story spread over Bach’s six suites,” Haimovitz says. “The complexity of some of these movements is unbelievable. If you are able to keep track of them, it’s dizzying. I don’t think any drug can match that.”

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