Word: ma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...even the weaker films are fascinating for what they reveal about the processes of making interpretive art. As Ma says 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 of Ma...
Whatever the merits of the six films that make up Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach, the two-CD sound-track album (Sony Classical), on which Ma plays the Bach cello suites without benefit of ice dancers, landscape artists or snappy one-liners from choreographer Mark Morris, is a major musical achievement. Ma's second take on the Bach suites is also a distinct improvement on the version he recorded at the age of 26 (which is still available on Sony). His playing has grown deeper and more forceful in recent years, and these warmly romantic performances faithfully reflect that...
...natural to wonder how Ma stacks up next to his most celebrated predecessors, Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich (both of whose complete sets are currently available on EMI). Casals' classic performances, originally recorded between 1936 and 1939, have a sober grandeur that continues to seize and hold the ear six decades later; the Rostropovich set, recorded in 1991, is a larger-than-life exercise in musical oratory that bears the same relationship to "normal" cello playing that one of Chuck Close's jumbo portraits does to a black-and-white snapshot. Ma's strong, sensitive playing falls somewhere between these...