One irony of a musician operating at peak level is that the technique enabling this, the virtuosity that otherwise attracts so much attention, is reduced to secondary interest. It becomes a given and retreats into the background, eclipsed by the purely musical values that a less-confident technique would obscure. At least that's the case when the musician is Yo-Yo Ma performing a solo recital as profoundly satisfying as he did on his latest visit to Seattle. The eager capacity audience was confronted by a Minimalist picture: a chair center stage, soon occupied by a suited Ma, his bright red tie a dash of colour counterpointing the bronzen gleam of his cello. And that's all that was needed to keep listeners as riveted to every note and sigh from Ma's instrument as if an epic adventure film were being projected.
Presented under the auspices of the University of Washington's dynamic World Series, Ma offered a programme of three of J.S. Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello, interpolated with three brief but eloquent pieces steeped in different folk traditions from around the globe. His encore spoke volumes: the Catalan traditional El cant dels ocells as arranged by Ma's great predecessor, Pablo Casals (who regularly performed it for his encores as a protest against Franco's fascism). In a nutshell, the evening fused several longstanding passions of the omnivorously curious cellist: his tireless re-examination of Bach's treasures and advocacy of contemporary composers, along with his ongoing efforts to bridge cultures and borders via the Silk Road Project.
Ma opened with an excerpt from a mid-20th-century partita for solo cello by Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun, exactly the sort of fare he likes to spotlight on his Silk Road Ensemble programmes. It announced a leitmotif of simple, straightforward, folk-rooted expressivity that might at first have suggested a mere contrast to the labyrinthine complexity of Bach's thinking in the solo suites.
Yet the short, folksy pieces weren't just picturesque interludes, tiny breaks separating Bach's mountains. Ma's playing elicited subtle cross-connections and revelations, generating an imaginary dialogue between all of the programme's composers. Indeed, he made a point of segueing without pause right into the ensuing Bach each time, as if continuing the train of musical thought.
One especially captivating feature of Ma's interpretations was his tendency to hone in on essential matters. What emerged, over and over, was a haunting simplicity beyond the complex gestures Bach uses to spin his polyphonic illusionism.
Not an undifferentiated simplicity, mind you. If the Sarabandes were heard to touch on the territory Beethoven would later explore in his late quartets (the sorrow beyond tragedy in no. 2, or the serenity aware of its transience in Suite no. 6), Ma underlined each suite's moments of groundedness in the exuberant rhythms of the body. The minuets and gavottes marked the return to earth, gently bringing us out of the preceding meditation.