New York

Playing classical music in a rock club isn't such a bad idea. At least in theory, you can give the music legs, taking it to people who'd never hear it otherwise. And young classical musicians -- some of them, anyway -- complain about the formality of the classical concert world. They say they can't even tell if their audience is listening. No wonder, then, that some of them are taking their music to more informal venues, including rock clubs.
But there are pitfalls, as cellist Matt Haimovitz unfortunately demonstrated last Friday, when he played at the venerable punk club CBGB.

He'd booked the club just as any rock band would, not to take it over for the night, but instead to take his place among the other acts that played there (which on Friday, for the record, were the Matt Sandy Band, the What, and the Any Surface Band). Thus he had a partly random audience -- not just people who came specially to hear him, but also some who came to hear the other music. That's good, because he reaches out more widely. But it's also bad, because not everyone will want to hear him. And those who don't will do what people always do in rock clubs when the music doesn't grab them (and often even when it does) -- talk.
Making this worse was CBGB's layout. It's a long, narrow space, with the stage far in the back. In front of the stage is a VIP space with tables, and behind that, looking back toward the door, stretches the rest of the club. There's a bar on one side, two more seating areas on the other, and -- squeezed between them -- room to stand or walk. Or, realistically, room to try to stand or walk, since the space is just a few feet wide, and everybody gets in everybody else's way.
When you're halfway back, it's hard to see the stage. Go further toward the door, and you can't see anything. You can hear, of course, because everything on stage is amplified, but a solo cellist offers special problems. Mr. Haimovitz played three Bach solo cello suites; a new piece, full of sober rhetoric, by David Sanford; and something he called "Anthem," a troubled version of "The Star-Spangled Banner," modeled on the famous, much more troubled one that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock.

His Bach was not for purists -- free, strongly inflected, full of contrasts. The contrasts, I think, would have been a little much, even in a concert hall; when Mr. Haimovitz played softly, he used so little bow that his sound lost its center, and the music seemed disconnected from what happened when he played more loudly.
But in CBGB, there was another, much more basic problem: When Mr. Haimovitz played softly, his sound got softer than the conversations going on around him. Or that's what happened when I stood behind the VIP tables. When I moved back to the bar, and stood with talking going on around me, I couldn't hear the softer parts at all. And as the evening droned on -- droned on distantly, for everyone who stood or sat where I now was -- the comments I was hearing weren't favorable. "This is bizarre," said someone, waiting for the next band on the bill.
He had a point. Mr. Haimovitz played for 90 minutes, which is longer than a band would play. With long hair and a T-shirt, he looked like he belonged in CBGB, but his timid chatter to the audience -- awkward jokes, awed Bach explications, vague references to CBGB's history -- suggested otherwise. The Bach suites seemed endless, wrong for such a crowded, noisy place.
And in the opinion of one guy standing near me (who in fact had come specifically for Mr. Haimovitz), "Anthem" notably fell flat. Jimi Hendrix, playing while the war in Vietnam raged, distorted his electric guitar sound into war-torn noise. Mr. Haimovitz, with 9/11 heavy in his thoughts, used sounds from the classical palette to make the same effect, but compared to Hendrix -- at least from the bar at CBGB -- he sounded far too well-bred. The man near me thought Mr. Haimovitz should have tried some of the electronic effects that guitarists use, and as I listened to the music, coming at me from speakers, far from the CBGB stage, that sounded like a good idea.

But in one way I'm not being fair. This event was part of a tour that took Mr. Haimovitz to many clubs, 11 of them (in 11 cities) in October alone. Most of these clubs (as one in Connecticut announces even with its name, The Acoustic Cafe) are places where normally you'd hear softer music than the furious punk that made CBGB famous. Very likely most of them have better sightlines, so people can see Mr. Haimovitz as well as hear him. These would be good places for a cello recital; CBGB, on the other hand, strikes me as a mistake, made possibly because Mr. Haimovitz or maybe his manager got carried away by its history and fame. His concert there was discouraging, at least for me. But if I'd heard him in a smaller, more intimate club, I might have believed he was making history.

Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2002