Bach and Beer on tap at Hunter-Gatherer

Cellist Steuart Pincombe is touring the country for a show that combines his two loves: classical music and beer. In “Bach and Beer,” coming to Hunter-Gatherer Brewery on Saturday, Nov. 21, Pincombe will regale audiences with stories about the art of brewing beer and the art of playing the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

The goal is to “get people thinking about what they’re drinking and what they’re listening to,” Pincombe said.

He typically pairs three Bach suites with three beers. “Any more and you’d have to drag people out at the end,” he joked.

Pincombe has been playing Bach’s music since he was old enough to tackle the composer’s tightly woven compositions. “It’s always been something very close to me,” he said.

Having lived in Germany and the Netherlands, he has learned to appreciate nice beers.

The concert is part of a project called “Music in Familiar Spaces,” a yearlong tour of the U.S. that has Pincombe and his wife, Michelle, pulling around a 1950s renovated trailer and bringing classical music to the masses. One of the aims of the “Music in Familiar Spaces” tour is to make classical music accessible to a wide and varied audience.

“What’s interesting is when I was thinking how the craft beer tradition often draws on old recipes, but reworks them for a modern audience, that’s exactly what I’m doing (with music),” Pincombe said.

Pincombe is a member of the cello and chamber music faculty at the Credo Chamber Music Festival in Ohio, co-director of the Baroque program of the Crescendo Institute in Hungary, and has held residencies at various institutions and conservatories in the U.S. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

As a Baroque cellist, Pincombe stays true to the tools of the period, playing a Baroque cello with a Baroque bow and reading from Bach’s old manuscripts. Yet he is working to make it fun and accessible to people today. Hence the beer. (In fact, Bach was once paid in beer.)

Pincombe said he often sees couples come to his shows for different reasons – The wife came to hear Bach, and the husband came to drink beer – but it becomes something they both can enjoy.

“It’s been really cool because what I’ve hoped has happened in every place,” he said. “Half of the people are coming for the beer, and the other half are coming for the music.”