Yo-Yo Ma Makes Bach Suites Personal in Informal Setting

Through a massive, multidisciplinary video project, Yo-Yo Ma has been reconsidering Bach’s six cello suites over the last five years. The films and attendant recording are out now, and Ma is touring in support of their release. On Thursday, he settled at the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church for a mountaintop performance of Suites 1-3 (with Suites 4-6 scheduled for Friday), presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.

The venue was chosen at the behest of Ma, who has been playing in nontraditional settings on this tour, avoiding proscenium stages wherever possible. The cellist made the proceedings personal in other ways as well, making an unannounced appearance in the preconcert lecture and chatting in the aisles during intermission.

Since these suites are musically in many ways about the humanization of the instrument, this unfeigned geniality and informality provided a supportive environment for the kind of fully engaged listening that they require.

But if the instrument is given human voice and body here, the suites are nonetheless dances of the soul, not the feet, as Ma clearly recognizes. At this point for Ma, however, that soul seems to be an almost operatically personal, rather than universal, spirit. The joy of the G-major Suite, the pain of the D-minor Suite and the sensual contentment of the Suite in C were all very real Thursday, with little sense of transcendence or sublimation.

This was most apparent in Ma’s approach to the repeats in the dances. Almost invariably, the second pass found fantasy becoming more rooted and tangible, and emotions more vehement, with the music firmer in sound, crisper in articulation and often slightly faster.

The great exceptions to this were the sarabands at the center of each suite. There the pattern was reversed, with the repeats disembodying all vestiges of corporality from the music. Paradoxically, these grave wisps of melody--always slower and softer--carried far more weight than did their more earthy, more note-intensive companions.

The gigues at suites’ ends found Ma tapping his feet sharply and putting a thoroughly physical exclamation point to the previous metaphysical dramas. Judging from some of the shouted encore requests for tangos, he may have succeeded there all too well. His encore, however, came from another of his recent crossover projects: Mark O’Connor’s lyrically rapt, utterly appropriate “Appalachian Waltz,” played with affectionate nuance.