|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Yo-Yo Ma, Bach, and the Unaccompanied Cello
| Article
# : |
18509 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,374 Words |
| Author
: |
Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott, based in New York, is a writer on
performance arts. |
In the list of things Johann Sebastian Bach could never have imagined, a lone cellist playing his Suites for Unaccompanied Cello in the cavernous expanse of Carnegie Hall must be very near the top. These six suites rank among the greatest pieces of solo instrumental music ever written, but in Bach's day they were probably heard by no more than a dozen listeners at any one time. In January, however, at an extraordinary recital by Yo-Yo Ma, it's very likely that more people heard this music in a single evening than ever listened to them in their first two hundred years of existence.
Ma's performance of the entire set of six suites to a live audience was a Herculean effort. The sight of his single chair placed front and center, without the presence of a piano (the cello's usual ally), accentuated the strange loneliness of the challenge ahead. The time of day, as well, was strange. The Sunday afternoon concert was in two parts, an hour and a half at five o' clock, a short dinner break, then another hour and a half at seven o'clock. The audience had to change its usual habits, devote more time to the music and eat dinner quickly between halves; it had to symbolically share the marathon difficulties of what Ma himself called "a crazy musical adventure."
The efforts, of artist and audience alike, were well worth it. There is a rich emotional trajectory in the entire cycle of six suites that one rarely gets to experience, except perhaps on recordings. Pablo Casals, who rescued these pieces from obscurity and gave them respectability as concert music, described the character of each of the suites as follows. The first, with its expansive, generous leaps upward in the bright key of G Major, was "optimistic." The Second, in D Minor, is darker and thick with many double stops; for Casals this was the "tragic" suite. The Third, in C Major, makes frequent and prominent use of the entire scale; it's assertive and confident character he described as "heroic." The Fourth, in E-flat Major, he called "grandiose," perhaps because of its broad, clean harmonic strokes and jaunty skips. The Fifth, in C Minor and written for an altered tuning (the top string is tuned down a full tone to give the instrument's sound a slightly different quality), was for Casals "tempestuous." And the final suite in D Major, written for a mysterious five-stringed, hybrid instrument, was a "bucolic" conclusion to the set.
Defying Standard Wisdom
Casals' descriptions are a kind of subjective shorthand that most artists replace with their own judgments. They are interesting,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
