by Daniel Hathaway
Alban Gerhardt at Dave's (photo: Dave's Supermarket)
41-year old German cellist Alban Gerhardt is in town to perform Matthias Pintscher’s Cello Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra, but he made his first public appearance on Wednesday evening in the fruit and vegetable section of Dave’s Supermarket in Ohio City, playing Bach unaccompanied cello suites for a group of onlookers and listeners that swelled to about a hundred adults and children during his 5:30, hour-long performance.
Alban got the idea of doing impromptu solo performances in unexpected places from his experience last July playing all six of Bach’s solo suites in the Radialsystem, an experimental venue in Berlin. As he writes in his blog, “I thought the Bach suites were a bit too complex and not exciting enough for an ‘untrained listener'”, but “a friend of mine attended the concert together with a gentleman who had never listened to classical music in concert before and who was so taken by the beauty of Bach’s music that he didn’t mind sitting relatively still for almost three hours”.
Mental wheels began turning, and Alban and his friend imagined other ways of delivering this music to people who didn’t know it belonged to them. They recalled an MTV experiment in the 90’s in which pop groups would appear in the morning on German radio stations and reveal their intentions to perform that night, asking the audience to suggest places where the concert could take place.
Alban’s version was “a little spontanenous radio-tour with Bach in Northern Germany” which produced solo appearances in a wine cellar, in a maternity ward for a new-born baby, after a youth orchestra rehearsal, for a dozen teenaged girls before a musical theatre company rehearsal, at a gym, for a group of anti-nuclear-waste activists at an alternative coffee house and in the music salon of a Cuban cellist. [Read more…]