Yo-Yo Ma at the Kennedy Center
Last night, cellist and, since January, United Nations Peace Ambassador Yo-Yo Ma played a sold-out solo recital in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, sponsored by Washington Performing Arts Society. On the program were three of the unaccompanied cello suites of J. S. Bach, pieces with which Yo-Yo Ma is widely identified in the United States. (The last time we heard an all-Bach cello suite recital like this was from Mischa Maisky at the National Gallery two summers ago.) As people were arriving, a few lucky subscribers, many of whom had bought their tickets months ago, were offered the chance to sit in special seats on the stage, to either side of the legendary performer. Even with this arrangement, there were very few empty seats in the large auditorium.
Bach likely composed the six suites around the year 1720, while working for a cultivated and musical prince in the town of Anhalt-Cöthen. This was the last position Bach held before taking the job of Kantor in Leipzig, where he wrote the majority of the great religious music we associate with him today. Whatever their intended use, the suites fell into obscurity after Bach's death, widely thought by later musicians to be experimental or theoretical works. In the 20th century, largely thanks to legendary cellist Pablo Casals, who played them regularly and made what many still regard as the definitive recording, everyone began to play them. Most people who are serious about classical music feel strongly about one interpretation or another. Yo-Yo Ma's way of playing the suites happens to remain one of my favorites.
What I like about the way that Yo-Yo Ma plays the Bach suites is the simplicity. Most other cellists tend to treat the score as the starting point for subjective alterations, and the music tends to be more about the performer's eclectic personality. Ma stays close to the score, treating each dance in a rhythmically coherent way, preferring to give shape not with soupy rubato but in articulation and dynamic contrast. It requires much more disciplined technique and, contrary to what other listeners sometimes charge, gives more interest rather than less.
Ma was not playing his primary instrument last night, a 1733 Montagnana ("Petunia"), but the instrument on which he usually plays Baroque music, the 1712 Davidov Stradivarius given to him by Jacqueline du Pré. It is an instrument that du Pré claimed was unreliable, and when Ma once or twice played too aggressively last night, it did tend to sound harsh. What sounded improved in last night's performance, over Ma's first and most famous recording of the suites, was the sense of restraint. The sound was pure and accurate and leaned beautifully toward the feeling of interior monologue. The Strad responded with lovely sound, from full, but not booming, to ethereally quiet.
The concert began with two suites based in C keys, both of which sit well on the modern cello tuning (C-G-D-A). The opening prelude of Suite No. 3 (BWV 1009, C Major) is a flashy toccata, consisting almost entirely of scales and arpeggios in running sixteenth notes. There is a long pedal tone, over 16 measures, where the first of every four notes is a low G, a striking passage in which Ma did nothing to draw attention to that repetition. It was just there, an unspoken obsession. Ma set the tone with brisk tempi, taking all of the repeats in the dances. The pulse rarely wavered, even in the Allemande, where there are contrapuntal dialogues between ranges of the cello, or the Sarabande, where there are multiple stops, requiring the cellist to play on more than one string simultaneously. In the Gigue, the drone sounds, probably meant to evoke the musette or bagpipe, had precisely the sound, as the great music critic Sir Donald Francis Tovey described this movement, of "drumming on open strings." The only negative in these performances, a very few scratches and squeaks aside, was an almost total lack of ornamentation beyond the few marks in the manuscript, something that ultimately brings Baroque music to life.
Second, Ma chose Suite No. 5 (BWV 1011, C minor), after a break during which he was probably retuning his cello's highest string from A to G, the scordatura, or retuning, Bach calls for in the score. (Bach also transcribed this suite in a version for lute, BWV 995, found in the Anna Magdalena manuscript with the cello suites, which gives us some ideas on how a player in Bach's time would have ornamented its melodies.) It is the most enigmatic of the suites, a tone announced in its French ouverture prelude, dominated by dissonant chords made of suspensions. As Bach intended by using the traditional forms of Baroque dance (although heavily stylized), Ma gave each dance a distinctive character: a pensive Allemande, the Courante galloping at a pleasant clip, a sphinxian Sarabande never wavering too much from its proper rhythm, a perfectly matched pair of bouncy Gavottes, and a gentle Gigue that evaporated into nothing on its final, whispered note.
After intermission, Yo-Yo Ma played the longest of the three suites he chose for this concert, Suite No. 6 (BWV 1012, D major). Bach specifies a tuning in the manuscript for an instrument of five strings, probably the violoncello piccolo. The notes that one would play on the highest string of such an instrument, tuned to E, can be played on the modern cello's highest string, but with some difficulty. As Ma sat down again to begin the suite, a smile beamed on his face, and indeed what is perhaps the most challenging of the suites to play rolled off the strings under that spidery left hand, flashing from point to point with grace. Those high E-string passages, far down the A string, were light and clear. The Gavotte had a lute-like crispness, with a dancing feeling of upward movement on the downbeat, as Ma's multiple-stop chords popped underneath the melody and the musette effect was charmingly rustic. The Gigue, at a strikingly rapid tempo, concluded the program with force.
Two encores delighted the audience: Turkish composer A. Adnan Saygun's Partita, op. 31, and Zhao Jiping's Summer in the High Grassland. The former has been featured by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, and the latter is by a Chinese composer whose other works have been recorded by the project. I cannot deny being a little disappointed not to hear a couple more suite movements by Bach.
If you missed the concert, you could console yourself with one of Yo-Yo Ma's recordings of the Bach suites. As a young performer, he made a recording of all six suites, recorded digitally in 1983. More recently, he has released a set of three DVDs, combining his new recording of all six suites with six interesting short films on topics ranging from gardening to the dance choreography of Mark Morris to Japanese Kabuki theater.