Matt Haimovitz
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Matt Haimovitz (born 1970) is an Israeli-born cellist now based in the United States and Canada. He is known not only for his outstanding technical and musical skill, but also for his highly unusual concert career and repertoire choices. Haimovitz is as likely to be found playing Bach in a pizzeria or jazz club as in a concert hall, and is as likely to be performing in a small town in the American Midwest or South as in one of the major musical centers. He is also as likely to be playing a piece by Jimi Hendrix as he is to be playing Bach or Dvořák. He mainly plays a cello made by Matteo Gofriller in 1710.
Musical education and early career
Haimovitz began to study the cello at the age of seven with Gabor Rejto in California. When Haimovitz was only twelve years old, his mentor Itzhak Perlman introduced him to the great artist and teacher, Leonard Rose. In 1983 Matt Haimovitz took up his studies with Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School. Rose described Haimovitz as "probably the greatest talent I have ever taught", praising his "ravishingly beautiful tone" and "unusual sense of style and musical sensitivity".
In February 1985, Haimovitz joined Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert which was filmed and broadcast. This success was followed in 1986 by an American tour with Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic, as well as concerts with the New York Philharmonic. In the same year Haimovitz was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant for exceptional musical achievement, the youngest musician to receive this award. Over the next decade, Haimovitz appeared with many of the major orchestras of North America, Europe and Asia, and worked with the most distinguished conductors. In 1987, at the age of 17, Haimovitz signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, where several of his recordings of standard and non-standard repertoire won international awards.
Recent career
After graduating from Harvard College in 1996, and with the termination of his contract with Deutsche Grammophon, Haimovitz became dissatisfied with the traditional career path of a modern classical musician. He began exploring non-standard classical and non-classical repertoire more intensively, and began a program of concerts in unusual venues. A 2002 North American tour that attracted international attention saw Haimovitz performing J. S. Bach's cello suites in night clubs, restaurants and other highly untraditional venues in a wide variety of towns and cities across the United States. This was followed in 2003 by Haimovitz's Anthem tour, in which he brought a variety of American compositions to a similar variety of audiences, including his rendition of Jimi Hendrix's famous improvisational rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
In 2000, Haimovitz founded his own record label, Oxingale, which has released CD recordings of his own recital programs, as well as music performed by others.
From 1999 to 2004, Haimovitz was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. Since 2004, he has taught at McGill University in Montreal as well as the Domaine Forget academy for the arts in rural Quebec.
Discography
- Matt Haimovitz Plays Britten, Reger, Crumb, Ligeti 1992
- Bach: 6 Suites for Cello Solo 2000
- The Rose Album 2002
- Anthem 2003
- Goulash 2005
- Haydn: The Cello Concertos; Mozart: Cello Concerto 2005
- Saint-Saens: Cello Concertos / Bruch: Kol Nidrei / Lalo: Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in D Minor 2005
- The 20th-Century Cello 2005
- Matt Haimovitz - Mozart The Mason 2006
- Après Moi, le Déluge 2006
- David Sanford & the Pittsburgh Collective: Live at the Knitting Factory 2007
- After Reading Shakespeare 2007
- Vinyl Cello 2007