Cellist Macintyre Taback is a chamber musician, teacher, and festival founder based in Boston. He is the cellist of the Abeo Quartet, founder and director of the Bennetts Point Cello Seminar, and a doctoral candidate at the New England Conservatory, where he also serves as studio assistant to Laurence Lesser.
Mac's 2026–27 season highlights include a tour with Musicians from Marlboro in April 2027 of Bartók's String Quartet No. 1, concerts with the Woodlawn Ensemble in Boston, as well as the fourth annual Bennetts Point Cello Seminar. He recently joined author Jan Swafford and pianist Anna Han at the Harvard Musical Association for a lecture presentation on Beethoven's Cello Sonata in A major and the "Eroica" Symphony.
Founded at The Juilliard School in 2018, the Abeo Quartet won the Silver Medal at the Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition and Third Prize at the Bad Tölz International Competition in 2023. The quartet has performed at Shriver Hall Concerts, Emerald City Music, The Kennedy Center, Sunday at Central, Chesapeake Music, and the Schneider Series in New York, and has held residencies at Caramoor (as Ernst Stiefel Quartet in Residence), La Jolla SummerFest, the Perlman Music Program, and Marlboro Music.
Mac feels lucky to be a regular participant at IMS Prussia Cove since 2022, including a 2025 tour with concerts at Wigmore Hall and Champs Hill, and has performed at Marlboro Music, Krzyżowa Music, the Kronberg Academy's "Chamber Music Connects the World," Four Seasons, Yellow Barn, and the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (LAMP). He has been featured as a guest with the Borromeo, St. Lawrence, and Emerson Quartets, has performed with members of the Juilliard, Artemis, Doric, and Elias Quartets, and has collaborated with artists such as Gidon Kremer, Gary Hoffman, Lawrence Power, Augustin Hadelich, Inon Barnatan, Jonathan Biss, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Kim Kashkashian, Viviane Hagner, Vivian Weilerstein, Alasdair Beatson, and Mark Padmore. His mentors include Steven Isserlis, Gary Hoffman, and the Brentano Quartet.
In 2024, Mac founded the Bennetts Point Cello Seminar in Green Pond, SC, an annual institute modeled on IMS Prussia Cove where 8–10 pre-professional and professional cellists work with Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott on various musical and cellistic topics. Past participants include prizewinners at the Queen Elisabeth and Naumburg Competitions, Concert Artists Guild artists, students at the Kronberg Academy, members of ensembles such as Eighth Blackbird and the Louis Vuitton Classe d'Excellence with Gautier Capuçon, and faculty at the University of Miami. At NEC, he has worked with students who have gone on to study at Juilliard, as well as to summer programs such as Heifetz, Vivace, and Brevard. He has also taught masterclasses at the Four Seasons Next Gen Initiative and led numerous school outreach programs for ages 5–18.
A native of New York City, Mac began the cello at age eleven in his school's strings program and earned a Pre-College Diploma at Juilliard. He holds a B.M. and Performance Certificate from the Eastman School of Music (2021, Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott), where he received the Harris Cello Award, and an M.M. from NEC (2023). He is completing his DMA at NEC with Laurence Lesser, Donald Weilerstein, and Vivian Weilerstein.
Mac plays a cello made by David Tecchler in Rome in 1723 and a bow made by Benoît Rolland in Boston in 2023.