There are several ways to describe such performances: as a great show, in which the audience of thousands of people really got involved in the second part, dancing along and singing along. But it can also be more Reich-Ranicki-like: There is a highly accomplished, professionally trained musician wallowing in the depths of arrangement paradises with his electronic cello apparatus and belting out the hits from film scores such as “Titanic” or “Pirates” with a rich pathos sound of the Caribbean”. Or he turns Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a high mass of fattening and so on.
More soberly, it should be noted that Štěpán Hauser, born in 1986, is an excellent cellist who caught the eye of Mstislaw Rostropowitsch, among others, studied with Ralph Kirschbaum and Bernard Greenhouse, among others, won several competitions and took part in the highly acclaimed Greenwich Piano Trio for a while. His original cello tone – beyond the amplification orgies in the Olympic Hall – lives from baritone “velvet” and expressive longing.
But Hauser wanted to be more than “just” a solid chamber musician. He looks great, has an offensive sense of humor and undeniably direct transmission power. After delighting huge audiences around the world with his compatriot Luka Šulić in the duo “2Cellos” for a while, he is now touring the world alone as “Rebel with a Cello” with good band musicians and a string choir with enormous success.
In the SZ interview, Hauser said that he felt like he was locked in a cage in the classic area. In addition, it is very difficult to have a career there. It really looks different now and sounds something like this: loud, pathetic, also schmaltzy and always intrusively aimed at overpowering. During the show, which became more and more wild over the course of the two hours and opened one barrel of hits and hits after the other until all the fans were standing in the hall, many playing fireflies with their cell phones and booming along to choruses, raging and dancing, twitching and sawing Hauser, carrying his electric cello in front of him, across the stage, at the end down to a circle around the hall and up again. As I said, the man knows his stuff. If André Rieu dangles in the shallowest kitsch, David Garrett serves up good pop infusions, then Hauser, on the other hand, is really a robust macho event with sound power and real fury.