2CELLOS

For any individual with a true passion for music, they will remember that initial one-in-a-million moment when they first heard their favourite artist or album. It’s a moment that creates doors in the mind and instils an unprecedented passion. It’s a moment that Stjepan Hauser, one half of Croatian duo 2Cellos, relays with a smile.

“I had on the radio when I was about 2 years old and I just remember hearing this beautiful sound,” he recalls. “It was just so warm and tender and gentle, it was just the right sound. I think sometimes violin can sound like it’s screaming because it is so high, and piano is too percussive, but cello was just right for my ear and I knew that it was what I wanted to play.”

It was a moment that fuelled him through a further education at both London’s Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. However, despite the classical training that he and his partner-in-cello Luca Šulić had received since childhood, it never quashed their love for variety.

“We had passions for rock, pop, film music and classical,” Hauser explains. “Cello is capable of playing many different things, so it would be a shame to just use it for one type of music. We also wanted to attract a wider audience, especially younger people, and get them interested and show them all of the possibilities that the cello has.”

It’s a mission that led them to their extraordinary cover of the Michael Jackson classic, Smooth Criminal. Hauser admits that the song “rocks really hard on cello” and as soon as he heard it he knew it would sound so cool, but both he and Šulić could never have anticipated how their lives would change when uploading their re-imagination to YouTube on one fateful night.

Three years later these cello connoisseurs have worked with the likes of Steve Vai, Lang Lang, Naya Rivera (Glee) and Zucherro for their sophomore album In2ition and have toured the world with Sir Elton John.

“It was an amazing experience because it taught us how to entertain big masses like 20,000 [people] every night,” Hauser says. “It’s very exhausting playing live because it’s just the two of us and we have to make the sound of a whole band and play so many voices, but we kind of see it as a sport, you know?” (CD)

May 19, York Theatre, Seymour Centre, City Rd & Cleveland St, Chippendale, $63.60+bf, seymourcentre.com