Recordings

Ma will try anything at least once. This is one of his most successful risks, an all-solo cello album of 20th century music that follows a coherent programmatic direction from start to finish. First, a transcription of fiddler Mark O’Connor’s plain-spoken “Appalachia Waltz” serves as an opening prayer. Then Ma explores several strands of his own roots, starting with Bright Sheng’s “Seven Tunes Heard in China,” which subjects Chinese pentatonic folk songs to Bartokian transformations, often with the same driving, biting, percussive edge. David Wilde’s anguished lament “The Cellist of Sarajevo” leads right into Alexander Tcherepnin’s Suite for Solo Cello, whose four brief movements exhibit a marked Chinese strain along with rough Russian vigor. Finally, as Ma digs impetuously into the Kodaly Sonata for Solo Cello, some pentatonic passages stand out, again in a work that transfigures folk elements. The quantity of personal and musical interconnections on this CD boggles the mind; luckily, the music is interesting too.