Matt Haimovitz: Not One Iota More

Read my review today on the Washington Post Web site:

Charles T. Downey, Haimovitz's "Figment"
Washington Post, October 20, 2009

Matt Haimovitz brought his latest CD program, "Figment," to Arlington's Iota Club and Café on Sunday afternoon. For several years, the Juilliard-trained cellist and professor at McGill University has traded on the alt-classical notoriety of performing in unconventional venues, but he drew a crowd that was no more diverse and not much younger than a typical concert hall audience. They even sat in reverent silence for the entire 75-minute program, even though it started half an hour late and had no intermission.

The playing had a bubbly, slightly unfocused energy, adding to the disorienting lack of rhythmic center prominent in the CD's title work, by Elliott Carter. A rasping tone and more elegiac smoothness came to the fore in Ana Sokolovic's "Vez." The amplification of Haimovitz's cello worsened the gaminess of some scratchy high harmonics, in works by Gilles Tremblay and by Haimovitz's wife, Luna Pearl Woolf. It made the noisy electronics component of Du Yun's "San" almost unbearable. [Continue reading]

Matt Haimovitz, cello
Iota Club and Café (Arlington, Va.)
Music by Carter, Sokolovic, Tremblay, Woolf, Du Yun, Stucky, Bach

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Matt Haimovitz, Figment (released on September 29, 2009) Oxingale OX2016

Other Review:
New York Times

In the earlier concerts on this tour Haimovitz appeared with composer Du Yun, and the spontaneity of their interaction may have been a large part of what was missing at Sunday's performance (Du Yun had to return to New York after the Philadelphia concert with Haimovitz). The CD has a much more finished (and artificial) sound, which although it is not a must-have by any means features some pieces worth getting to know, including Sokolivic's Vez, the Carter pieces, Tremblay's Cèdres en Voile (Thrène pour Le Liban), and especially Stephen Stucky's Dialoghi.

Matt Haimovitz Previously on Ionarts:
2008 recital | Bach cello suites