MUSIC REVIEW : Cellist Yo-Yo Ma Focuses on Bach Suites at Ambassador

A recital devoted to three of Bach’s Suites for unaccompanied cello might strike the average concert-goer as austere and abstracted to the point of highly rarefied parody.

However, much to the audibly expressed surprise of many in the long lines outside Ambassador Auditorium on Saturday, there is an army of intrepid, sophisticated cello fanciers in Los Angeles. Yo-Yo Ma offered Suites 1, 5 and 3 Saturday evening, and the other three Sunday, both times for sold-out houses.

This is music written both to entertain and to challenge composer, performer and an adventurous band--preferably small--of serious listeners. In these dances the physicality of Bach’s music is made as manifest as its spirituality.

Ma’s view of the works proved personal and poetic, fusing a variety of contradictory impulses in an understated but clearly Romantic approach. Though his Montagnana instrument would ring roundly when suitably urged, Ma’s most characteristic playing Saturday was feathery in sound, blandly slurred and often nearing inaudibility.

The results inevitably spoke more convincingly for Ma than for Bach. Ma’s reserved, ruminative style served neither the outgoing and sensuous quality of the Suites in G and C, nor the purgatorial pain of the Suite in C minor.

The cellist generally stuck to quick, well-measured tempos, though in the faster movements he was inclined to shortchange cadences. The lines, however, lacked definition and any sense of earthy, kinetic orientation, with accentuation seeming more a byproduct of bowing than of melodic or metrical considerations.

The second Minuet in the Suite in G and the first Gavotte of the C-minor Suite were the most firmly grounded dances in Ma’s performances. There is, of course, a large element of abstraction in the music, but it should remain rooted in corporeal action. Ma carried much of it into a realm of personal musing.

Period-performance practice appeared of little interest or inspiration to Ma, either. Though observing all repeats, he added no embellishment or ornamentation, contenting himself with altering the bowing of a few phrases and/or the dynamics, usually from soft to softer.

Within the subdued context of his rapt, idiosyncratic vision, Ma could be quite expressive, as in the hesitant, almost worshipful restraint of the C-minor Sarabande. Technically, of course, he proved endlessly resourceful, fleet and accurate throughout, however much one longed for something tougher and more substantial interpretively.

The attending throng evinced little doubt or reservation about what it heard, mustering a standing ovation at the end. With another evening of Bach still to go, Ma responded only with a series of beaming, triumphant bows.