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Yo-Yo Ma And His Solo Cello Take Meany Theater By Storm

A sold out Meany Theater greeted cellist Yo-Yo Ma with tumultuous applause as he walked out on stage Tuesday night for a rare solo appearance on the UW World Series. There was one lone chair stage center, for him.

His program was vintage Ma: gathering in music from around the world and dovetailing it with familiar Bach. Steven Lowe’s program notes gave more enlightenment as to what Ma was demonstrating, a creative amalgam of modern Western musical ideas with international styles and folk traditions. He played for us the Allegretto from Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun’s Partita for solo cello, a Western format but with Turkish musical idioms. He played Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” soft musings over a drone that sounded like bagpipes, the composer’s bow to the local music of that area but in classical style. And he played Chinese composer Jiping’s “Summer in the High Grassland,” which had the distinct flavor of a Scottish lament combined with Chinese slurps up and down, short and long like musical Chutes and Ladders.

In between each of these, Ma played a Bach Suite, Nos. 1, 2, and 6, all for solo cello. However it was Lowe who pointed out that all of these suites have Bach integrating French or Italian style with his own German heritage, so smoothly that we don’t even consider it today. Then, as now, Italian, French and German are recognizable as individual musical languages and they were perhaps even more so in the 18th century. It was Bach who fused them into an international language.

Whether audience members read the notes or not, the performance was sheer pleasure. Ma’s musical eloquence in conveying the emotional meaning of a work, the warm beauty of the tone he drew from his Stradivarius cello, the deep understanding of the composer’s intent had the audience spellbound despite a good deal of unstifled coughing from all over the house.

While all was a joy to hear, perhaps the last work, the Bach Suite No. 6 in D Major, was his most towering achievement of the evening. Of the six dance movements, in the Prelude he tossed off soft roulades of notes so fast that while each was individual, they were almost a blur to hear; the Allemande became a quiet, pensive soliloquy, the Courante amazingly light and fast, at times highly articulated and at others legato, while the Sarabande had an intensity of emotional feeling but always within the bounds of Baroque decorum. Crisp and jaunty Gavottes and a lively Gigue completed the whole. It was a revelation.

The audience surged to its feet with bravos and applause, and on a second bow, Ma returned to play one encore. He first mentioned that he owed much to Pablo Casals, the first modern cellist to undertake these Bach Suites almost a century ago, and he played Casals’ free flowing, eloquent arrangement of a Catalonian folksong “Song of the Birds.”

May he come back again, soon, to Seattle.