Grinning right back at the man with the cello

“How was the symphony?” a colleague asked on Friday, Sept. 15, the morning after the San Francisco Symphony’s season-opening concert. “Yo-Yo Ma,” I answered.

And while there are so many other names to be cited — maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, foremost; event Chairwoman Priscilla Geeslin; benefactors Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem, Dede Wilsey and Bernard “Barney” Osher, to whom a Thomas-composed rococo version of “Happy Birthday” was sung; the staff and crew of McCalls Catering and Blueprint Studios — it was Ma’s performance and presence that gleamed the brightest.

The cellist walked out on stage carrying his instrument with the pleasure of a mischievous cat coming in from the garden carrying a mouse for its owner. Ma looked at the other musicians, acknowledging them with a sly smile and a glance as he bestowed the same favor on the wildly applauding audience.

Thomas always starts conducting quickly, a few seconds after mounting the podium. Ma seemed to have been in the middle of wise-cracking with the violinists around him when the maestro lifted his arms to conduct the SaintSaëns cello concerto. The cello part starts very quickly, so in one moment, Ma was laughing; the next, he wielded his bow and got down to business, with what seemed no pause at all between the good time and the serious time. It seemed, in fact, that the good time was the serious time. As the piece flowed forth, Ma had a big grin on his face, a soloist not lost in his own ego but responding to the other players and the music flowing around him.

Not to make light of the music itself, but in addition to listening to Ma, there’s a whole other pleasure in watching a man at work who knows he’s up to the job: Babe Ruth, pointing to the place he knew he could hit one out of the park.

Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations of the Asia Society, is a friend of Ma’s. He said at intermission that the cellist was the son of classical violinist Hiao-Tsiun Ma, who had demanded that as a young boy Ma rise early every day to practice Chinese calligraphy and to learn a few bars of the six J.S. Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

“Although he remembers hardly relishing this early morning regimen,” Schell said in an email the next morning, “it did — by his own admission — inculcate him early on in a rare combination of Confucian discipline (listen to your father) and Western spirit/soul (understand the emotional heart in a great work of music).”

Schell sent a link (www.tinyurl.com/ nokde74) to a recording of Ma at 7 years old, a serious little boy, performing with his 11year-old sister, YeouCheng Ma, at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. Somewhere along the road of his long and distinguished career, Ma must have understood that although different kinds of music would present different kinds of challenges, basically, he had it down. To say that’s a good thing is an understatement. Ma shares the euphoria of letting the good times roll.

Down by the bay on Tuesday, Sept. 12, the Commonwealth Club threw itself a housewarming/opening celebration, as described by J.K. Dineen. The 49ers sent drummers and cheerleaders, there was a welcoming invocation (by Rabbi Beth Singer of Congregational EmanuEl), a goodbye benediction (by the Rev. Paul Fitzgerald, president of USF), and in between, just what you’d think: speeches.

The club, after all, is about talk, and freedom of speech was evoked by almost everyone — club CEO Gloria Duffy, Mayor Ed Lee, Supervisor Jane Kim and more — who took the podium. As to specifics — recent wrestling matches at UC Berkeley — reference was gentle. The Commonwealth Club, 114 years old, is a place where people behave themselves.

There were thank-yous to donors and nods to board members and praise for architect Marsha Maytum. Then Willie Adams, president of the Port Commission, noted that the club’s new site, at 110 the Embarcadero, was once headquarters of the West Coast ILA, the longshoremen’s union. The building, he said, is “holy ground for the workers.”

In 1934, he said, after two longshoremen were shot in the back by a policeman, “the union retaliated by having a march down Market Street, 70,000 people marching in silence.” The general strike that followed lasted a week.

Duffy’s father was one of those who worked on the waterfront, said Adams, while the afternoon wind picked up and offered relief to listeners baked by the sun. “In this beautiful city, you will see the ghosts.”

“I can’t wait to tell ladies they can’t bring their $4,000 bags into the stadium.”

Usher to usher, overheard by Allen Matthews before the Sept. 9 football game at UC Berkeley, where new rules mandate that all bags carried in be see-through