Matt Haimovitz & Chris O’Riley in RVA.

[Matt & Chris executing brilliance at the Modlin Center at U of R. Last time I was in this room was for a sexual harassment seminar freshman year. This was infinitely more important.]

Sometimes I love music so much I want to poke a hole in it, put my mouth up to it and suck it in like a tick. It becomes more important than anything else going on in that moment [as evidenced here]—proof this phenom still exists was the tears streaming down my face after Matt Haimovitz spent 2-3 seconds checking the tuning of his cello. That’s really all it took.

I’m sort of embarrassed to say I didn’t know much of anything about these two when I scrolled through the Google results for “live music in Richmond VA tonight” and dumped the rest of my glass of wine in a Solo cup and took off to U of R campus with, like, negative 3 minutes to spare. But it was pure magic, seeing as how they kept plucking songs from my favorites and turning them into soaring—but at the same time, tight—marriages of wistful key strokes and the mournful cello. Chris (host of NPR’s From the Top) and Montreal-ite, Matt, are doing the kind of thing I live to stumble across.

Genius. [Get the album Shuffle.Play.Listen here or on iTunes. One half pop/one half classical.]

And a perfect impromptu night out by myself.

I wonder how many of the whitehairs in there are new Maynard fans?

-Carey