Beethoven on Tap

George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) is listed just north of the lamb chops. Beethoven is down by the shrimp, Hindemith to the left of the lobster. This unique wedding of calories to composers occurs on the menu of a restaurant in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, and it is dedicated to an intriguing proposition: if jazz can move into the concert hall, classical music can move into the bar.

The men behind the idea are Hal La Pine, a used-truck dealer, and Trucker Pat O'Neill, for the past seven months owners of La Pine's restaurant, on Chagrin Boulevard, where on Monday nights they offer musicales featuring string trios or quartets, solo pianists or violinists, most of them drawn from the ranks of the Cleveland Symphony. Promptly at 9:15 p.m. last week, the members of the Concert Guild String Quartet appeared at the restaurant in white tie and tails and launched into an hour-long program of Schubert's Quartet in A Minor and Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (with an assisting clarinetist). The audience, swirling their drinks, listened avidly.

Until the musicales started, the restaurant was losing some $4,000 a month. Now the place is prospering. La Pine-O'Neill have found that they can pack their restaurant not only by playing the music of the masters but also with modernist works of such composers as Irving Fine and Gunther Schuller. Next: Menotti's 30-minute opera The Telephone. The musicians find the whole thing relaxing, and countless bourbon drinkers have told O'Neill that they have never heard Beethoven in quite so clear a tone.

An equally happy meeting of food, drink and the classics occurs every Sunday afternoon in New Haven, Conn., at a nightclub known as the Playback, which attracts fans like Author Thornton Wilder, Diplomat Chester Bowles and Composer Quincy Porter to hear serious music spiked with first-rate jazz. Playback is the plaything of Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell, the two jazzmen who touched off a modest international incident last year when they introduced cheering Russian audiences to the intricacies of the Cool. Equally at home in jazz and classical music (Ruff has a master's degree in music from Yale, Mitchell studied at the Philadelphia Music Academy), the two decided after their return from Russia to open a club where they could play Brubeck back-to-back with Bartok.

Instead of sinking their money in a leather-topped bar and zebra-striped divans, they hired a good sound engineer to build an acoustically perfect room. In a typical program, Ruff and Mitchell, assisted by Composer-Pianist Robert Helps and Drummer Charlie Smith, presented the U.S. premiere of Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn and Piano, followed it with a Ruff-Mitchell composition titled Fugue for a Jazz Trio. The club features a regular string quartet from Yale, and will draw heavily on the talents of such Yale faculty members as Violinist Howard Boatwright, Pianist Seymour Fink. Like their Cleveland counterparts, Ruff and Mitchell feel that the relaxed atmosphere of a club makes for ideal listening. "In a club," says Willie Ruff, "you never get the guy who sits down stiffly and says, 'O.K., so thrill me.'

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