Yo-Yo Ma's Suite Life?

By Bruce Handy and Daniel S. Levy

The door bangs open, and Yo-Yo Ma blows into the hotel room with a cheerful, disarming grin and a loud "Ta-daa!" As an entrance, it is both worthy of a superstar and, in its self-aware over-the-topness, a commentary on the absurdity of being a superstar in the first place. Heeeeeere's Yo-Yo Ma, the postmodern virtuoso! Lugging his cello and dressed in formal attire for a just completed photo shoot--tight scheduling is one of the defining characteristics of his day-in, day-out existence--he takes off his jacket and asks the two journalists present, "Mind if I change?" Since no one will admit to offense (come on, Yo-Yo, we're delighted; you just gave us our story's lead), Ma proceeds to strip down to his underwear before slipping into street clothes.

Is this what it means to be an elite classical musician in the age of Clinton? One has a hard time picturing Mstislav Rostropovich pulling off his pants in front of reporters. Nor, for that matter, can one picture Pablo Casals recording albums with jazz singers or Texas fiddlers or Argentine tango musicians as Ma has done. Or either cellist initiating, as Ma has, an ambitious series of six hour-long films inspired by Bach's six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, involving collaborators as diverse as movie director Atom Egoyan, modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris, ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean and landscape architect Julie Moir Messervy. The films, to be shown on PBS starting in early April (following last month's release on CD of Ma's new recordings of the suites on Sony Classical), are only fitfully successful--stunts, one could argue. But their very ambition, their willingness to court failure, ought to be prized in a classical-music world obsessed with dwindling audiences.

"Is classical music dead?" is the standard rubric for critics' thumb suckers on the subject. Yo-Yo Ma, for his part, is trying to liven things up. Besides his numerous collaborations, he has been commissioning new works, experimenting with electronic instruments, exploring the links between the European tradition and other world music, and involving himself in music education on every level from Sesame Street to Tanglewood. "The whole idea of what music is and what culture and education are has changed so much," says Emanuel Ax, the pianist who is a longtime friend and performance partner of Ma's. "Yo-Yo is in a way the right man at the right time. I think we need people like him if music is to remain a truly vital force."

A child prodigy, Ma never toed the expected line, cutting class regularly, pounding brews at music camp and leaving his cello in the rain, passing up the conservatory for a liberal-arts education at Columbia and then dropping out without telling his parents (he later graduated from Harvard). Now 42, Ma has long been possessed of an easygoing, boyish--at times even goofy--charm. "He's a doll," says Morris. "Everybody knows it, and it's a cliche, but it's true. I'd like to think there's something vicious about him, but I've never seen it."

As a cellist, Ma is renowned for effortless technique, a rich tone and a masterly feel for interpretation that allows his performances to breathe with an almost jazzlike spontaneity. "Yo-Yo has an ease of playing that is given to very few. It is a kind of mastery that gives one the greatest possible freedom," says violinist Isaac Stern, a onetime mentor of Ma's. "He is probably the most perfect instrumentalist I have ever seen," says Ax. "I spend hours and hours practicing every day. Yo-Yo can afford to sleep late and have lunch, and he still plays much more perfectly than I do."

Since making his first recording at the age of 22, Ma has released more than 50 albums, winning 12 Grammys in the process and enjoying a number of crossover hits, including Hush with vocalist Bobby McFerrin and Appalachia Waltz with bassist Edgar Meyer and violinist-fiddler Mark O'Connor (the latter CD has been a fixture on the classical charts for 76 weeks). But life as an elite musician has its dreary side. Ma has a grueling concert schedule that keeps him on the road roughly half the year. Ax's comments notwithstanding, Ma practices where he can--in hotels, airports, trains, the back of limos, by the side of the road and, if he's lucky, at home in Boston's suburbs, where he lives with his wife and two children. During a rehearsal last December with tango musicians in a New York City nightclub (he was touring in support of his album of Astor Piazzolla compositions, Soul of the Tango), Ma cracked, "The faster we play, the faster we can have dinner." It was a joke, of course, but it probably sprang from a very real impulse: at this point in his career, fending off boredom may be Ma's greatest challenge as an artist.

"It doesn't always help to go back to the same capitals and play the Saint-Saens cello concerto," he says--a rarefied rut, but a rut nonetheless. "If I can't remember what I did [during a given performance], something is really wrong. I set myself the goal that I damn well better remember at the end of the year what I did, or otherwise I shouldn't be doing it." He shrugs off criticism of his experiments with "lesser" genres: "Where do these designations like 'You are a classical musician, you can't do this' come from? The way people think of classical music is probably 50 years old. When we think of German music today, we think it is heavy, deep and conservative. If you look at the time period in which this music was written, it was the opposite. Bach was a wild guy. He took unbelievable risks."

Aside from sheer intellectual curiosity there is a practical reason for Ma's restlessness. "A pianist," says Ax, "could go on playing for 100 years and not begin to play the complete standard repertoire. For a cellist, if you are a talent like Yo-Yo, by the time you are 25 you have mastered all the cello concertos that are known." Through numerous commissions, Ma has done his best to expand the repertoire. Still, he's swimming his laps in a comparatively small pool.

At the center are the Bach suites, technically demanding pieces that have an elusive yet keen emotional pull, at times both mournful and celebratory. Performing them all in one evening, as Ma has on occasion, and will again this month in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, is a feat of endurance--marathon and obstacle course in one. These are pieces that Rostropovich did not essay on record until he was in his 60s. Ma first recorded them when he was just 26. It is music entwined with his life: he first encountered them at four, when his father, a violinist and a pedagogue, introduced him to the cello by having him memorize passages from the suites. Thirty-two years later, he would play one for his father when the elder Ma was on his deathbed.

The impetus for the new recordings and the series of films, collectively titled Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach, came in the early '90s, when Ma got to musing about the extramusical implications of Bach's work. With the exception of the collaboration with Egoyan on the fourth suite--a fractured but more or less conventional narrative with an enigmatic power similar to the Bach--each film is split in two, documenting the collaborative process as well as its result. The pairing with choreographer Morris (for the third suite) is particularly inspired. Others are more frustrating, with Ma either not quite connecting with his partners or his partners not quite connecting to Bach or, in the case of the landscape architect (the first suite), the creative process being stymied by forces outside the artists' control (it turns out you need a lot of money and a lot of people to cooperate if you want to build a big public garden in Boston, even a Bach-based one). As for the Torvill and Dean piece (the sixth suite)--well, one either enjoys ice dancing or finds it kind of silly.

But even the weaker films are fascinating for what they reveal about the processes of making interpretive art. As Ma says during a discussion with Morris, "I think that what this music is attempting to describe is something that can take all of the imagination of lots of people put together, and still it's trying to describe something that we can't quite grasp." That living, ineffable something about Bach's music, of course, is what makes it art; if you could pin that down, the music would wither. One imagines the same might be true of Ma.