Yo-Yo Ma has long since joined the ranks of superstar soloists whose brand-name appeal runs so deep they can be guaranteed of filling seats season after season, no matter how many times they are re-engaged. Having performed a concert and recital double-header with Daniel Barenboim as recently as January at Symphony Center, cellist Ma reprised that feat Sunday and Monday nights at Ravinia, where his partner was Christoph Eschenbach.
The two programs marked Ma’s 10th season at the festival, and the place was predictably jammed both nights. The concerts made an absorbing study in musical contrasts, reminding us how this most versatile of cellists renews himself each time he sets horsehair to strings. In Eschenbach he was fortunate to have a conductor and pianist whose appetite for and dedication to music in a broad humanistic sense are as great as his own.
Shrinking the 3,000-seat Pavilion to the size of a small, intimate recital hall is a job best left to pros. When they sat down to perform an all-Beethoven recital there on Monday night they looked awfully small on that vast empty stage. But their music-making was big, in all senses. The cellist’s tonal projection in fact was so good that a listener at the very back of the amphitheater would have had no trouble catching his wispiest dynamic. And the balance between cello and piano actually proved more judicious than that of cello and Chicago Symphony Orchestra the previous night.
The program completed the Beethoven sonata cycle Ma had begun with Barenboim earlier this year downtown. The duo paired the greatest of the sonatas, No. 3 in A, Opus 69, with the two early sonatas, Opus 5, tossing in the charming Variations on “Bei Maennern,” from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” for felicitous measure.
Both musicians clearly were enjoying their opportunities for shared exploration. The spontaneous way in which each engaged with the other, and with the music, could only work to Beethoven’s benefit. The early keyboard-dominated sonatas were models of Classical balance and proportion, while the Opus 69 (where the two instruments are more evenly matched) drew a little more of everything than one normally hears–more headlong drama, brusque vigor, kinetic excitement.
A songful account of the opening movement from Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata was a generous encore. If Ma wants to return to Ravinia for more such inspired evenings, he would hear no objections from anyone who was present on Monday.
The popular cellist was just as giving at Sunday’s concert with the CSO when he presented Elgar’s familiar Cello Concerto and Saint-Saens’ unfamiliar “La Muse et le Poete,” for violin and cello, which was having its first CSO performance.
Ma has played the Elgar with the CSO as recently as 1996, and two years before that at Ravinia. He is, of course, a master of the music’s elegiac introspection. No cellist alive produces such a wealth of burnished tone in the long-breathed lyricism of the slow movement. I wondered, though, if the meditative stasis of his Adagio hasn’t crossed over into self-indulgence, and I find his repertory of beatific smiles and grimaces a mite distracting.
If you listen and don’t look, Ma remains a marvel. Eschenbach’s accompaniment to the Elgar concerto was perhaps more rigid than the more expansive and flexible Ma would have liked.
“The Muse and the Poet” is a slight piece of late-Romantic salon music that gave the soloists, Ma and CSO co-concertmaster Robert Chen, the chance to converse as musical equals. Their partnership could hardly have been finer.
Another French rarity, Andre Jolivet’s 1949 Flute Concerto, served as the vehicle for the Ravinia/CSO solo debut of another orchestra principal player, first flutist Mathieu Dufour. It proved a delicious discovery. Set within the intimate frame of a string orchestra, Dufour was by turns lyrical, piquant and jazzily capricious. More, he spun a seamless cantabile without ever seeming to take a breath. A dazzling performance.
The 1919 “Firebird” Suite of Stravinsky ended the program in a reading strong in fantastical atmosphere, each section drenched in vivid colors.
