Yo-Yo Ma
During Ma’s recital of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for unaccompanied cello at Orchestra Hall, the crowds, large and grateful, were treated to more moments like that than one had any right to expect. The technical demands of such a program are obviously monumental, but the job of just keeping the audience interested in this rather difficult and peculiar music must be even more daunting. The suites follow the standard Baroque model: four traditional court dances–allemande, courante, saraband, and gigue–plus a pair of newer dance figures rotated through the second-to-last position. Each suite is introduced by a prelude, where the composer allowed himself some leeway, but otherwise the progression is the same in every case. These severe formal constraints served Bach in the same way that the rigidities of the sonnet served Shakespeare: they defined the limits that genius requires for the creation of art.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For the performer, however, this regularity presents a problem: how to catch and hold a mixed audience with music that’s likely to sound pretty much the same to anyone hearing it for the first time. And even for aficionados satiety must be a real danger. Imagine serving a meal composed of one beef course after another. It might be worth something as a kind of philosophical inquiry into the essence of beef, but how many guests would find the experience digestible?
Considering the lack of excitement onstage, the younger members of the audience conducted themselves quite well; the back of my seat received fewer kicks than I normally get during the same amount of time on an airplane. The grown-ups were also polite and didn’t detain Ma unduly with their clapping.
How long could Ma keep this up? In the final suite I failed to pick out any of the pulsating echo effects of the prelude, but this too may have been the fault of the acoustics. The next two movements came off reasonably well, though Ma’s approach, elegant as it was, didn’t do justice to the majesty of the allemande. I think of it as a kind of call and response, though in a very dark vein, which is better served by a more muscular attack.
