Ma’s Bach is fresh, intimate and grand
Yo-Yo Ma is a rock star. Everything suggested by that simple statement is true. The cellist plays large arenas — on Sunday, Sept. 30, it was the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, presented by Cal Performances — for huge crowds of adoring fans. He’s perfected a performing style that combines intimacy and grandeur, and as he returns to the greatest hits of the back catalog — on this occasion the Six Cello Suites of Bach — he keeps finding ways to tweak them, reinterpret them and keep them fresh.
The moniker also is applicable in the more colloquial sense of someone who is jawdroppingly good at his job.
But because there is something faintly comical about the notion of classical-musician-as-rock-star, Ma also took a moment on Sunday night to gently poke fun at the whole undertaking. As he took the stage, he adopted a series of rock-god poses — arms upraised, muscles flexed — and smilingly encouraged the waves of applause coming from the crowd.
It was all tongue in cheek, of course, but the shtick served to reinforce the fundamental modesty of Ma’s undertaking. It was his way of saying, yet again, that for all his celebrity and star power, the point of the evening was for the audience to join with him in the experience of Bach’s music.
And we did. To glance around the Greek in the midst of Ma’s 2½-hour trek through these intricate and elegant works was to see row upon row of faces turned toward the stage in rapt, silent, engaged wonder, and to feel oneself part of a community of listeners.
We marveled at the combination of delicacy and expressive urgency he brought to these scores. We delved into the rhythmic vitality of the individual movements that make up each suite, a legacy of
Hearing him proceed through them in order makes one wonder why we ever encounter them any other way.
the music’s roots in the metric and rhetorical patterns of dance. And we exulted in the singular aspects of Ma’s artistry — the fluency of his bowing, the rich, chestnutty tone he draws from the instrument and the air of looseness and freedom that only gets more pronounced with age.
Ma is in the midst of a twoyear project centered on recital dates in which he plays the Six Cello Suites in a single sitting. Hearing him proceed through them in order makes one wonder why we ever encounter them any other way.
One reason, admittedly, is the physical exertion involved (at several points, during applause breaks between one suite and the next, Ma led the audience in brief spurts of limbering calisthenics). Yet in opposition to that is the joy of hearing the music grow darker, more gnarled and impassioned during the transition from the light-footed First Suite to the richly philosophical Sixth.
Ma proved to be a wondrous guide on that journey, authoritatively pointing out the landmarks and vistas while leaving individual travelers to engage with them as seemed best. Highlights for this listener included the pointed grace of the Gigue in the Second Suite, the robust emotional power of the Fourth Suite’s Sarabande, and nearly the entire Fifth Suite, which seemed at times to tremble with the expressive weight packed into and between its lines of counterpoint. There were many others.
Ma’s encore at the end of the program was the “Song of the Birds,” the Catalan anthem of freedom that had been championed by Pablo Casals — the cellist who put the Bach suites at the center of his instrument’s repertoire. It was a fitting end to an uplifting evening.