Of course there is, says Matt Haimovitz, who on Wednesday brings the music of composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Lou Harrison to Kilby Court, the all-ages Salt Lake City club that more often plays host to the likes of Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab for Cutie.
The places where Bach's music originally was played were more similar to, say, New York's CBGB than to Carnegie Hall, Haimovitz noted. He recently played the composer's unaccompanied cello suites in the castle of Bach's patron Prince Leopold in Cthen, Germany, where the suites likely were heard for the first time.
"I started imagining different things," he said. "I could visualize people dancing a sarabande, people just talking. . . . It was far less formal than a concert-hall experience with the rows of seats and nobody talking."
He ended that performance with his transcription of Jimi Hendrix's legendary take on "The Star-Spangled Banner."
"I felt it was justified," said Haimovitz, who believes Bach would have experimented with the electric guitar if the technology had been available to him.
The cellist is on a nationwide "listening-room" tour of clubs and coffeehouses with his latest album, "Anthem." It includes pieces by Harrison, David Sanford, Augusta Read Thomas, Tod Machover, Toby Twining and other composers who are considered "classical," if only because no one has come up with a better term. With contemporary composers increasingly showing the influences of jazz, tango, blues and other idioms, "the lines are blurred, and that's part of the fun," he said.
"I don't mind the word 'classical'; I mind what it has come to mean," said Haimovitz, who hopped off the prodigy track in search of artistic freedom. He studied with Leonard Rose and has performed with musical heavyweights such as Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim, Seiji Ozawa, Isaac Stern and Mstislav Rostropovich; he continues to perform with artists such as Kent Nagano, Shlomo Mintz and the Miro Quartet, with whom he played at Salt Lake City's Libby Gardner Hall about a year ago.
He has commissions in the works from his wife, Luna Pearl Woolf, who is writing a piece for cello and choir; Sanford, who is working on a big-band concerto to premiere in the spring; and Machover, known for his work at the MIT Media Lab, who will write a "hyperconcerto" in which "the audience interacts and becomes the orchestra," said Haimovitz, who wants to explore what a cello concerto means in the 21st century.
Like a rock musician, Haimovitz varies his set list from night to night, depending on "how I feel and what I feel from the audience."
He loves the diversity of his club audiences, who for the most part "listen without prejudice, take it for what it is and absorb what's there. . . . I really envy people who are hearing [the Bach suites] for the first time."
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Bach to the future
Matt Haimovitz performs Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. at Kilby Court, 741 S. Kilby Court (330 West), Salt Lake City. Tickets are $10.
