Yo-Yo Ma at the Kimmel (1st review)

It was certainly heartening to see an overflow crowd for Yo-Yo Ma at Verizon Hall, with the audience spilling out onto the stage. It begs the question, at a time when the cries of the death of classical music are as loud as ever: What is Ma doing right?

In a way, that question was answered in the evening's first selection: a three-section suite of light, tuneful music by Morricone, Gershwin and Mariano, dispatched with both grace and pizzazz, like so many lollipops tossed out to an adoring crowd. Ma exudes a kind of genuine, radiant charisma that can't be acquired by attending Juilliard, and he marries it to an intoxicatingly rich cello tone.

But what does this have to do with great Brahms playing? Not a lot, as it turned out.

Brahms pours his heart out in the big, passionate music of his Sonata No. 1 for Cello and Piano. In the first movement he calls for a fast, but tempered pace, allegro non troppo. But Ma was surely shy of the intended tempo, playing at nearly andante.

This approach made for confoundingly bland Brahms. Ma's beautiful tone delivered neither bite nor flashes of anger. Brahms wants this music to both shout and whisper; Ma chose to sit comfortably somewhere in between, cheating the performance of veracity and depth.

'He is bored'

What's going on? I asked a friend of mine, a retired conductor who has followed Ma's career. "He is bored," said my friend. "He is playing masterpieces like the Brahms Sonata hundreds of times too many, allowing it to become stale. And he is playing too much Morricone."

So, not surprisingly, Ma offered more of the same Sunday with the Rachmaninoff Sonata for Cello and Piano. Here was another big-boned, heart-on-sleeve bruiser, emasculated by cello playing that skirted the piece's profoundly melancholic Slavic soul. Ma seemed to surprise himself when he once or twice slapped his instrument's soundboard in moments of accidental passion.

Fortunately, the performance was rescued by Ma's faithful accompanist, the superb British pianist Kathryn Stott, whose bold, imaginative playing, enlivened by playfully articulated rhythms, made this work sound like a piano sonata with cello accompaniment.

50th birthday gift

The evening's highlight, though probably not intended as such, was what I assume was a local premiere of clever, well-constructed music by the fine young British composer Graham Fitkin, whose music Stott champions. She commissioned the piece as a gift to Ma for his 50th birthday; thus its title, L.

Fitkin's music possesses the motoric drive and patterned repetitiveness of Steve Reich, as well as a similar emphasis on texture. The music doesn't lack expressive content, but it's the excellent craft, above all else, that impresses. Those parameters suit Ma's current style just fine.

Ma threw one more lollipop at his fans with a clichéd encore, The Swan, from Saint-Saëns. This staple of the student recital repertoire was actually the evening's most touching performance, as Ma seemed finally to relax and just make music, as he once did so earnestly, with a magically nuanced tonality that came across as a prayer.♦


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