Word: bachs
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...pants in front of reporters. Nor, for that matter, can one picture Pablo Casals recording albums with jazz singers or Texas fiddlers or Argentine tango musicians as Ma has done. Or either cellist initiating, as Ma has, an ambitious series of six hour-long films inspired by Bach's six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, involving collaborators as diverse as movie director Atom Egoyan, modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris, ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean and landscape architect Julie Moir Messervy. The films, to be shown on PBS starting in early April (following last month's release...
...this' come from? The way people think of classical music is probably 50 years old. When we think of German music today, we think it is heavy, deep and conservative. If you look at the time period in which this music was written, it was the opposite. Bach was a wild guy. He took unbelievable risks...
...center are the Bach suites, technically demanding pieces that have an elusive yet keen emotional pull, at times both mournful and celebratory. Performing them all in one evening, as Ma has on occasion, and will again this month in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, is a feat of endurance--marathon and obstacle course in one. These are pieces that Rostropovich did not essay on record until he was in his 60s. Ma first recorded them when he was just 26. It is music entwined with his life: he first encountered them at four, when his father, a violinist...
...impetus for the new recordings and the series of films, collectively titled Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach, came in the early '90s, when Ma got to musing about the extramusical implications of Bach's work. With the exception of the collaboration with Egoyan on the fourth suite--a fractured but more or less conventional narrative with an enigmatic power similar to the Bach--each film is split in two, documenting the collaborative process as well as its result. The pairing with choreographer Morris (for the third suite) is particularly inspired. Others are more frustrating, with Ma either not quite...
...during a discussion with Morris, "I think that what this music is attempting to describe is something that can take all of the imagination of lots of people put together, and still it's trying to describe something that we can't quite grasp." That living, ineffable something about Bach's music, of course, is what makes it art; if you could pin that down, the music would wither. One imagines the same might be true...