cello

Renowned as a musical pioneer, cellist Matt Haimovitz has inspired classical music lovers and countless new listeners by bringing his artistry to concert halls and clubs, outdoor festivals and intimate coffee houses, any place where passionate music can be heard. Through his visionary approach – bringing a fresh ear to familiar repertoire, championing new music and initiating groundbreaking collaborations, innovative recording projects for Oxingale Records, a tireless touring schedule as well as mentoring an award-winning studio of young cellists at McGill University's Schulich School of Music in Montreal – Haimovitz is re-defining what it means to be an artist for the 21st century.

Haimovitz made his debut in 1984, at the age of 13, as soloist with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. At 17 he made his first recording with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for Deutsche Grammophon. Haimovitz has since gone on to perform on the world's most esteemed stages, with such orchestras and conductors as the Berlin Philharmonic with Levine, the New York Philharmonic with Mehta, the English Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Kent Nagano. Haimovitz made his Carnegie Hall debut when he substituted for his teacher, the legendary Leonard Rose, in Schubert's String Quintet in C, alongside Isaac Stern, Shlomo Mintz, Pinchas Zukerman and Mstislav Rostropovich.

The solo cello recital is a Haimovitz trademark, both inside and outside the concert hall. In 2000, he made waves with his Bach "Listening-Room" Tour, for which, to great acclaim, Haimovitz took Bach's beloved cello suites out of the concert hall and into clubs across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Haimovitz's 50-state Anthem tour in 2003 celebrated living American composers, and featured his own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner." He was the first classical artist to play at New York's infamous CBGB club, in a performance filmed by ABC News for "Nightline UpClose."

Haimovitz's recording career encompasses more than 20 years of award-winning work on Deutche Grammophon and his own Oxingale Records, the trailblazing independent label he founded with composer/producer Luna Pearl Woolf. Among other awards and acclaim, two recent Oxingale albums have been nominated for Juno Awards: After Reading Shakespeare and Mozart the Mason

In 2006, Haimovitz received the Concert Music Award from ASCAP for his advocacy of living composers and pioneering spirit, and in 2004, the American Music Center awarded Haimovitz the Trailblazer Award, for his far-reaching contributions to American music. Born in Israel, Haimovitz has also been honored with the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1986), the Grand Prix du Disque (1991), the Diapason d'Or (1991) and he is the first cellist ever to receive the prestigious Premio Internazionale "Accademia Musicale Chigiana" (1999). Haimovitz studied at the Collegiate School in New York and at the Juilliard School, in the final class of Leonard Rose, after which he continued his cello studies with Ronald Leonard and Yo-Yo Ma. In 1996, he received a B.A. magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard University. Matt Haimovitz plays a Venetian cello, made in 1710 by Matteo Gofriller.

Performances

Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | October 29, 2017
Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston | September 21, 2008
Tsai Performance Center at Boston University | May 6, 2001

News and Press

[CD Review] Classical Lost and Found reviews Paul Moravec: Northern Lights Electric and Thomas Oboe Lee: Six Concertos

With these two recent releases from BMOP/sound we get an attractive bouquet of concertos from a couple of America's most highly regarded contemporary composers, Thomas Oboe Lee (b. 1945) and Paul Moravec (b. 1957, see below). Lee was born in China but left there with his family in 1949, spending ten years in Hong Kong and another six in Brazil. He then emigrated to the United States in 1966, where he pursued extensive musical studies, graduating from Harvard in 1981. He's received a number of outstanding awards, and now teaches at Boston College.

Classical Lost and Found Full review
[Concert Review] Concert Review: Matt Haimovitz and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at the ICA

On Sunday, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music’s last pair of concerts at the ICA began with two people and finished with over sixty, in a glass box on the harbor. The former were Matt Haimovitz, on cello, and Geoff Burleson, on (and in) piano. Children standing on the postmodern boardwalk outside pressed their faces against the window as Burleson hit keys with one hand and reached in with the other to pluck at the piano’s viscera, as Augusta Read Thomas’s Cantos for Slava (2008) required.

Bostonist Full review
[CD Review] Tod Machover: The Hyperstring Trilogy

Tod Machover’s Hyperstring Trilogy, on the Oxingale label and by some distance the most exhilarating disc release of these otherwise drab summer months, sets off memories of the not-too-distant past and stirs up all kinds of hopes for a not-too-hopeless future.

LA Weekly Full review