Copious Notes

Cellist Ben Solle (center), guitarist Justin Craig and drummer Jon Moore perform at The Dame Dec. 11. LexGo photos by Rich Copley.

More photos below.

If I want to see a hot young cellist in Lexington, it’s pretty obvious where you’ll probably find him or her: on the stage of an area concert hall, like the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for the Arts. In fact, a week ago last night, a hot young cellist was on the Singletary stage: Andrea Kleesattel, playing Antonin Dvorak’s legendary Cello Concerto with the UK Symphony.

The Dame is not such an obvious venue for hot young cello talent. The Main Street bar and music hall is a place where a lot of the musicians crank their six strings up to 11. But Thursday night, cellist and Lexington native Ben Sollee was centerstage, rocking and mesmerizing a packed house. That was a lot of people without gray hair listening to a cello — and I say this as a guy quickly acquiring my gray.

Ben Sollee at The Dame.

Sollee undoubtedly has talent. But maybe the biggest thing this twentysomething has going for him is imagination.

He took a fairly traditional route to learning the instrument, picking it up in elementary school, excelling enough to join the Central Kentucky Youth Orchesrtra, and studying the instrument at the University of Louisville, which he graduated from in 2006. But somewhere in there, Sollee heard more to his instrument than just concert and recital halls and people who patronize those venues. He heard folk, he heard the blues, he heard rock ‘n’ roll, he heard the Appalachian music his father played around the house.

And now, in his performances and recordings, we hear it.

Sollee is not unusual. Music schools these days are teeming with kids who appreciate and have mastered the complexities of traditional classical music but grew up in a pop, rock world and want to find ways to marry the two. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross called it a shuffle generation: kids who load their iPods with a wide variety of music and then let it play together in shuffle mode. We just maybe think of them trying to forge those unions in little clubs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

But here, in Central Kentucky, it can be manifest in things like the numerous fiddlers I’ve met who are studying classical violin, and vice versa.

Sollee is doing it quite effectively, and a key to what he is doing is that he does not diminish his craft. He hasn’t reduced cello down to three chords and a six pack of beer — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

His Dame performance was full of virtuosity and a keen ear for the structure of his songs. Highlights included a rendition of Change is Going to Come, which he grew from a solo piece back into a jam with his band, building on a central theme. Maybe the most fun was I Can’t Be You, which Sollee said he was supposed to play on guitar, but he left it backstage. So, he plucked and strummed it on cello like that’s the way he always played it.

Maybe there is a Dvorak concerto in Sollee’s fingers he will someday play, if he hasn’t already. Maybe his could be a career that straddles the concert hall and club more legitimately than many artists who’ve attempted to “cross over.”

But at this moment, he seems to be taking his cello exactly where it needs to go.

Read Walter Tunis’ review of Thursday’s Ben Sollee concert.

Here are a few more pics from last night:

Neva Geoffrey and bassist Matt Duncan opened the show.

Neva Geoffrey

Guitarist Matt Duncan put a little slide into his performances with Neva Geoffrey and Ben Sollee.

Daniel Martin Moore played his own set and sat in with Ben Sollee for a number.

Ben Sollee during one of numerous cello solos in his set.

A singing cellist is not something I can recall seeing before.

Before UK students go on break and before music lovers are buried under an avalanche of seasonal tunes, the University of Kentucky Symphony will present a free concert of orchestral masterworks with several noteworthy guests. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday (Dec. 4) in the Singletary Center for the Arts, the orchestra will feature the winners of its annual Concerto Competition and Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear in a preview of the orchestra’s trip to Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in February.

Gov. Steve Beshear. Photo by Charles Bertram.

Beshear will narrate Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, one of the pieces in Our Lincoln, a program featuring the American Spiritual Ensemble, Lexington Singers, Nick Clooney and many other Bluegrass State artists, which was presented at the Singletary Center last February. When it travels to D.C. in 2009, the concert will include violinist Mark O’Connor, Metropolitan Opera singer Angela Brown, and UK graduate and Met tenor Gregory Turay.

Thursday’s concert will also feature Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

The concerto competition belonged to the strings as the winners were cellist Andrea Kleesattel, who will perform Antonin Dvorak’s Cello Concerto Thursday, and violinist Duo He, who will play Niccolò Paganini’s Violin Concerto.

Kleesattel is a member of the award-winning Niles Quartet and received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He is a native of Tianjin, China who began playing violin at age 3 and has since won several national awards in his home country. The violinist is a sophomore at UK.

Thursday’s concert will also feature a performance of Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Admission to the concert is free.

We mentioned Christmas music, and this weekend, the University of Kentucky choirs present their annual Collage: A Holiday Spectacular at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday.