TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012891/0128440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 99

Yo-Yo Ma's Crazy Adventure


The cellist triumphs over the Bach suites -- and more


    When Pablo Casals first began performing Bach's six dense,
slow-moving Suites for Unaccompanied Cello back at the turn of
the century, just one of them on a given program was considered
a heavy burden for any audience to bear. As late as 1960, the
suites were used in Jules Dassin's Never on Sunday to torture
Melina Mercouri until she could escape to the more congenial
sounds of the bouzouki. But when Yo-Yo Ma started playing them
at age five, his father taught him that Bach would assuage
fear, loneliness, hunger: "He told me always to play a movement
of Bach before going to bed."

    Ma learned well. Last week a sellout audience crowded
Manhattan's Carnegie Hall at the odd hour of 5 p.m. to hear the
35-year-old Ma play not one but all six Bach suites in a row,
in a 4 1/2-hr. marathon interrupted by a one-hour dinner break
and two intermissions. It is not an unheard-of feat, but it is
a decidedly rare one. Paul Tortelier, for one, performed all
six in London; Jerry Grossman, co-principal cellist in the
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, played them in Manhattan just a
week before Ma. But for the miraculous Ma to undertake this
project was something special.

    He strenuously prepared himself during the preceding week
by playing several of the suites at concerts in Montclair,
N.J., Washington, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Boston. When such a
warm-up works, he says, "you are so into the music that you
don't control it anymore. You are led by it." The day before
the concert, Ma relaxed at home in Winchester, Mass., and took
his daughter to a birthday party. After flying to New York, he
spent the preconcert hours in stretching exercises and deep
breathing (which he repeated during intermissions). He ate
almost nothing. "Eating makes you tired, and I was trying to be
focused." All his preparations were designed "to build enough
mental as well as physical stamina." Says Ma: "I am trying to
remind myself what I am doing. I am playing the music not to
show off or prove anything. I want to share something of what
the music means."

    Music speaks its own language, of course, which in this case
is the language of dance -- allemandes, sarabands, gigues and
so on. All these dances have implications partly sensuous,
partly religious. Says Ma: "Bach takes you to a very quiet
place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are
calm and at peace." But when Ma played the suites in Carnegie
Hall, the main effect was one of pure beauty. Ma does not have
a big, grasping Slavic tone like Rostropovich or Piatigorsky,
but his slighter, sweeter sound was exquisite. After the fourth
suite, Ma thanked his listeners "for joining in this crazy
musical adventure" and dedicated the fifth suite to peace. Then
came bravos and, at the end, a standing ovation.

    After eating a granola bar in his dressing room, Ma went out
to celebrate. A couple of parties later, he returned to the
Manhattan apartment of his in-laws, who had gone home earlier
-- and found that he had forgotten his keys. Not wanting to
disturb anyone, and still in his evening clothes, he stoically
stretched out in the hall and went to sleep: a touring virtuoso
who gives 90 concerts a year can cope with almost anything. At
5:30 a.m., a deliveryman tossed the morning papers across Ma's
recumbent body. Only an hour later did his dismayed
father-in-law discover him, just in time for a little breakfast
before an 8 a.m. appointment with representatives of Sony
Classical records. But as his father taught him, the best
antidote to fear, loneliness and hunger is Bach.


By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Nancy Newman/ New York.