The following article, originally entitled "The Magic of Yo-Yo Ma," by Richard Thorne, is reprinted from the Saturday Review.
He gave his first public recital at the age of six. By the time he was 19, critics were comparing the young cellist to Russian-emigre master Mstislav Rostropovich and invoking the memory of Casals. With no dissenting voices and a remarkable lack of critical equivocation, Yo-Yo Ma was hailed not only for his technical brilliance, but for his precociously developed powers of interpretation. What so impressed the musical community was the mind behind the music, the palpable intelligence that suffused his playing.
Then, too, Ma as a performer has a special quality, what New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg calls "factor X"-a charismatic personality and the ability to project it while playing, which separate an artist from the pack. Ma, says Schonberg, "comes right out over the footlights and hits you square in the face." When Ma was 22, the New York Times was saying that any speculation about his talents maturing or ripening with age "would be entirely presumptuous."
Isaac Stern champions Ma (now at the ripe age of 25) as "one of the prime talents of our time." Lorin Maazel of the Cleveland Orchestra, himself a string-playing prodigy, recognizes in Ma a true colleague. He conducted Ma in a recent recording of Lalo and Saint-Saens concertos and says, "Ma is a cracker-jack instrumentalist. As a conductor one never has to worry: His thorough competence carries him through every imaginable pitfall. And he is a sensitive musician. He knits himself into the fabric of the music, he becomes a part of it. He plays with great panache."
Saturday Review 's music critic Irving Kolodin points out that there is often a narrow distinction between an out standing musician and a very good one; what separates them is not so much techniques as personality. In this connection, Harold Schonberg tells of once asking Artur Rubinstein to name the best young pianists. Rubinstein replied, "They all play better than I do. They have better memories, techniques you wouldn't believe. But I'll tell you one thing, when they come out on stage they might as well be soda jerks." Ma, says Schonberg, "is no soda jerk. "
A growing number of musical professionals have begun touting Ma as the world's greatest living cellist, and a recent survey of record producers and musicians' agents pegged him as the leading candidate among all younger soloists (whatever their instrument) for future superstardom. Who is this young colossus and what makes him so special?
He was born in Paris, October 7, 1955. His father, music teacher, violinist and composer Hsiao-Tsiun Ma had left China to settle in Paris during the thirties, preferring the musical climate of Europe. He started Yo-Yo's older sister playing the violin when she was two and a half, and he began teaching Yo-Yo the cello (using a child-sized instrument) when the boy was four.
"My father has always been interested in education," Yo-Yo Ma remembers. "My sister was his first guinea pig. He taught us everything from the beginning: theory, ear training. He would poke a note on the piano and say, 'What's this. Is it an A? That's right, it is an A.'"
(File photo)
Yo-Yo jokingly refers to his father's educational discipline as "the whips and chains." But he also remembers, "I would learn only two measures a day, which is no strain at all. And obviously, if the next two measures are the same, you're in luck." After a year of study, Yo-Yo had learned, two by-two, all the measures of three Bach cello suites. "Everyone would say to my father,' Ma, You're driving your kids crazy!' But it wasn't hard work. My father didn't believe in long hours of practicing; he really believed in very concentrated work. It was mentally hard work. I used to practice only five to 10 minutes a day, but whatever I did had to be done with tremendous concentration. And you know, I hated those 10 minutes. But then I had the advantage of living with those Bach suites for .. .just think: I've been playing them for 20 years now!"
The elder Ma successfully taught his son the excitement of musical challenges. If a phrase didn't work the first time they would play musical games, trying to figure out different ways of solving the problem. "I wasn't just learning the physical parts of the instrument, but really thinking: If this doesn't work, how am I going to get around it?" Ma feels that the problem-solving process he learned then frees him now from having to spend long hours practicing, a chore he has always, until recently, disliked. "And learning the way I did, stringing the last two measures onto the next one and on and on-one sees how one pattern overlaps another, how the music expands and contracts."
Ma gave his first recital at the University of Paris when he was six. The next year his father moved the family to New York in order to take a position teaching at a school attended by Isaac Stern's children. Through this connection, Stern heard Yo-Yo play. Impressed, he recommended Ma to his frequent chamber music partner, cellist Leonard Rose at Juilliard. "At first," says Ma, "I think Rose wondered, what do I do with a kid?" He ended up teaching a lot by demonstration, which seemed to work; not so much by analyzing, but mainly through sort of feeling the instrument, being at one with it."
Ma studied with Rose from the age of nine until he was 16. "By the time Yo-Yo was 11 or 12, " recalls Rose, "I had al ready taken him through all the most difficult etudes. He may have one of the greatest techniques of all time. I'm always floored by it.
When Ma was 16, Rose suggested he spend the summer at Meadowmount, a music camp run by the late Ivan Galamian, whose students included Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuker man and Jaime Laredo. "I think Rose wanted Galamian to teach me the bow arm, " says Ma. But he learned little that summer. Released for the first time from his disciplined home environment, Ma recalls, "I just went wild: Never showed up at rehearsals, left my cello out in the rain, beer bottles all over the room, midnight escapades to go swimming and just about everything. "
On the advice of Stern, among others, Ma enrolled at Harvard, and that seems to have restored a certain balance to his life. " It made me less neurotic, " he says, "by seeing all the possibilities in life." He took courses he'd always wanted to take-German, sociology-and met people in other fields, expanding his perspective beyond the somewhat insular world of music. It allowed him, he feels, to make a more open-eyed commitment to music." After I graduated I could tell myself: I have a BA, I can do other things if I want to. It's not that I'm stuck playing the cello because it's the only thing I can do."
Since graduating, Ma has begun pursuing a soloist's career in earnest. He, makes his home in Cambridge with his wife, Jill, who teaches German at Harvard (where Ma is artist in-residence). But often he is traveling to perform all over the world, giving recitals (frequently with pianist Patricia Zander) and concerts under such conductors as von Karajan, Previn, Mehta and Ozawa. During the past season he formed an occasional trio with pianist Emanuel Ax and violinist Young-uck Kim.
Ma's position as rising young superstar is unusual, given his instrument. Through the 19th century, most cello soloists were appreciated for their virtuosity, but few were credited with musical depth. Most composers felt uncomfortable writing for the cello (Dvorak and Saint-Saens, for instance, wrote first-class concertos for the instrument, but each also complained of its musical intractability). As a result, the solo repertoire is limited, and to choose the cello is to perform pretty much the same compositions everyone else plays.
Pablo Casals (1876-1973) finally convinced the world that the cello could match the violin as solo instrument, that virtuosity on the cello could be wedded to musical intelligence and the 20th century has responded. Many modern composers have written for the instrument, including Reger, Kodaly, Hindemith, Britten, Carter, Crumb and Penderecki. And in Casals's wake has come a procession of first rate virtuosos: Gregor Piatigorsky, Pierre Fournier, Janos Starker, Jacqueline du Pre, Matislav Rostropovich, Leonard Rose-and now Yo-Yo Ma.
It is tempting to account for Ma's success by citing the unusual cultural mix in his background, the kind that often produces a wide ranging empathy blended with a cautious detachment. Ma, who grew up speaking French, Chinese and English, feels that he has absorbed the common humanity that runs through Chinese, French and American traditions. "If you are exposed to different cultures," he says, "I think there's a tremendous amount of cross-fertilization that goes on which, to men, only enriches the individual." Ma thinks of himself, he explains, as completely American, "but my family's more like a stereotypical Jewish family than anything else. My mother: Eat, eat, ess, mein Kind-except she says it with a Chinese accent. "
But clearly, Ma's artistry can't be explained so simply. On top of his cross-cultural perspective, one must add the close, measure-by-measure analytical training he received from his father, and his acceptance into the highest international music circles before he was in his teens (even if, at first, only as a pupil). In addition, Ma explains, he strives to under stand verbally most of the music he plays, a goal few other musicians pursue. In rehearsal, he will often discuss the score just like a method actor dissecting a new script. "It makes me more precise:' he says I, Rather than making sweeping statements, I have to support my argument. We do, though, some times get carried away. You can get so conscious of finding the right word that you spend two hours without playing."
To pianist Emanuel Ax it is Ma's intelligence, coupled with his natural flair for performing, that makes him "one of the greatest string talents I’ve encountered. Yo-Yo always likes to have good, solid, intellectual reasons for why we play things a certain way. He's developed his brain, he's a thinking person. And one doesn't have to bow to technical considerations when playing with Yo-Yo. I can ask him to do anything, to play a note or a phrase on a certain string, try for a certain color-I probably annoy him with my suggestions sometimes. I'm a frustrated string player."
Observed in rehearsal with the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra, Ma slips as easily in and out of the music as he might slip into French during a bilingual conversation-but it is a conversation that always demands 100 percent of his attention, with which he is thoroughly involved. Playing along with the orchestral parts, he engages the musicians around him as if he were playing chamber music, gesturing with his bow arm to the cellist across the podium, looking back at the violinists, exaggerating the attacks, trying to pump up the rhythmic vitality of the piece. During slack moments he jokes with the students (though fully professional, there still exists in the boyish Ma something of the college cut-up). But on stage or off, it is simply in Ma's personality to be completely there, no matter what he is doing. And when he's playing, as Young-Uck Kim says of him, he never simply performs, he's always totally inspired. The solo lines ring out with a special intensity.
The sound Ma draws from his cello (made in 1722 by Matteo Goffriller in Venice and previously owned by Pierre Fournier) is as pure as any other prominent cellist's-except Rostropovich's, whose deep cashmere opulence is in a class by itself. Moreover, Ma's feeling for and his ability to communicate the Romantic repertoire is on a par with-but not better than-Rose's or Piatigorsky's. The talents that carry Ma to the head of the pack are his electrifying virtuosity and the breadth of his musical sympathies. When Rostropovich rips into a bravura display, for instance, listeners gasp and think, "It's astonishing what he can do with a cello!" But when Ma's fingers dance through a similar passage, listeners think, "That can't be a cello. It sounds as if he's playing an oversized violin!"
On records, it is easy to trace Rostropovich's virile, Byronic attack through most of the cello repertoire. Similarly du Pre's interpretations nearly always sound ethereal, lost in wonder at the music's beauty. Ma's interpretations, on the other hand, always downplay his own personality in favor of the composer's. He can be alternately dashing and melting as the Lalo or Saint-Saens concertos demand- but he can just as easily become airy and frolicsome when he turns to Haydn in a way that Romantic specialists can't. His recording of the two extant Haydn concertos (CBS Masterworks M-36674) offers more delight in the composer's cheerful good humor than any other interpretation on record. Ma's cello seems to burst periodically into chuckles. No other cellist is so perceptively at home with the music of Haydn and Lalo and George Crumb.
When the late Pablo Casals was at his best-like Toscanini, like Heifitz at their best-his interpretations could persuade an audience that no second interpretation was possible: This was the way the music had to sound. Ma has not yet accumulated a legacy of such ultimately persuasive performances- but at the age of 25, Casals hadn't either.
What Ma has proven once and for all is that his virtuosity is unique and fearless. Recently he even began performing his own transcriptions of Paganini's satanically difficult ca prices for the violin. "I made myself do them for some per verse reason," Ma says, "a week before I was to play them in concert for the first time, I panicked. Why had I ever decided to do this? I started practicing four hours a day and developed a new muscle on my hand." He flexes his hand and a lump appears where one wouldn't expect it. "When I got to the concert I almost had to be pushed out on stage. But I did it-for which I'm now grateful. Everything else is easy compared to that. It's given me a new freedom playing; I can 'experiment more on the musical values and not have to worry so much about technical things."
Ma overcame another hurdle when he underwent a successful operation for curvature of the spine last summer, and it seems to have assured a rich future for himself and for music-lovers alike. "I used to think that life ended with that operation," Ma says. "I didn't dare plan ahead. I was prepared to do something else afterwards; there was always this one per cent chance something might go wrong. But now, suddenly, I feel that the rest of my life is ahead of me, which is a luxury I never had before. It makes me very, very happy.
At 7, Ma performed in “An American Pageant of the Arts." in Washington, D.C. (with sister Yeou-Cheng, 11-now a pediatrician). (File photo)
The ways of Talent
When cellist Li Tien-hui,a student form Communist China studying in the United States, defected to the Republic of China, she had already met follow cellist Ma Yo-yo. "Although a talented musician," commented the Chung-Kuo Shih Pao (China Times), “Li was often sent by the Communist authorities to the country or to workshops for labor and reform. One time she was prevented from practicing for a four to five year stretch. When she met internationally known musicians Ma Yo-yo and Lin Chao-liang in the United States, she began to realize that only in a free society can musical talent be cultivated ..’
The following brief interview with Ma Yo-yo, together with the Saturday Review article, are revealing in the ways of talent and for its final requirement of an environment of freedom:
Q. Please sketch your life and musical career ?
A. I have played cello for 22 years. My parents are Chinese. I was born in Paris in 1955 and began to practice cello with my father at the age of 4. When I started my cello lessons at a music class opended by a renowned string. instrument shop in Paris, I had to pile three telephone directories on the chair to reach a proper height. Later, I had to bring a specially made collapsible chair.
Q. Do you think there are any special factors contributing to the success of young Oriental performers?
A. Music is somewhat similar to language. Musical talent exists in different countries and cultural backgrounds. It is natural that some composers create musical pieces unique to their own country. However, I think, since music presents the sentiments of mankind, it is endowed with a universal trait. Therefore, different as societies may be, as long as special attention and effort are directed to cultivating musical talent, it will eventually burgeon and grow.
Q. What kind of records do you like best?
A. Most of the material is classical, including Wilhelm Furtwangler, Toscanini, Antonio Janigro, Casals and the Budapest Quartet. My favorite piano records include Brahms' Piano concerto No.2, Dinu Lipat'ti's works, Beethoven's No. 4 played by Rudolf Serkin, Brahms No. 1 by fleishcher, and Mozart by Kurzon.
Q. Have you ever run into any frustrating experiences during your many performing trips?
A. Certainly. Once I was on a plane flying directly from London to Los Angeles for a recital at the Hollywood Bowl, an open theater: the rehearsal went smoothly. Unexpectedly, a downpour in the afternoon "washed away" the performance. It is said that it was only the second time that Hollywood experienced a summer rain in the last two decades. On the following day, I took another plane back to London. On another occasion, I received a long-distance call from von Karajan. He asked me to meet him at 9 a.m. of a certain day for a recital at Lausanne, Switzerland. On the eve of that day, I had another recital in London and it was nearly im- possible to make the appointment. However, I was not in any position to say no to von Karajan. I had to rent a chartered plane and fly to Zurich at 4 a.m. I took a taxi and finally arrived at Lausanne at 8:45 a.m. But, instead of von Karajan, what awaited me was the news that the recital had been canceled. I spent 2,000 pounds for nothing.
Q. Why didn’t you ever join any musical contests? What do you think about musical contests?
A. I think joining musical contests gives young musicians the opportunity to perform for the public. I am lucky; I have always had opportunities to perform. From my experiences as a judge of musical contests, I think that it is almost impossible to decide among talented musicians. However, it is a job the judge had to do.
Q. Please tell us your plans for record production.
A. I plan to record for CBS during 1982. The material includes a Bach non-accompanied cello suite and the co-production of Bach's cello sonata, with my harpis cord co-player. In addition, I intend to produce a recording on Beethoven's cello sonata collection and one of his variations, with Ax. Part of these has been done. I also intend to record Brahms' cello sonata for RCA.