Yo-Yo Ma, a virtuoso at more than the cello

He may be the greatest cellist in the world and, some would argue, the greatest cellist ever. Legendary players such as Pablo Casals, Jacqueline du Préand Mstislav Rostropovich, have all left indelible marks. Casals was the trailblazer with the passionate commitment to human dignity. Du Préwas a tragic and beloved figure, a player of extraordinary drama and charisma. Rostropovich helped build the instrument’s modern repertoire, inspiring or premiering works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and a host of others. But Yo-Yo Ma consolidated everything that came before, made it look effortless, and somehow found time to go past the cello and refashion himself into something bigger. He has invented a term for what he does, though he is too modest to apply it to himself except as a goal. He is the consummate “citizen musician.”

His people say he lives out of a suitcase, and it’s easy to believe. Ma performs around the world, playing the Dvorak cello concerto in Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Kansas City in a typical stretch of several weeks. He has recorded more than 75 albums, with Grammy Award wins almost an annual occurrence (five for chamber music, four for crossover and multiple wins as a soloist). The Kennedy Center Honors is only one item on a very long list, including the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom just last year. Few artists today can guarantee a sellout crowd, which means that orchestras and concert presenters rely increasingly on a handful of super-musicians with enormous name recognition and audience loyalty. Ma is one of them. But more than anything else, Ma is renowned for never giving a second-rate performance, never being off his game, never phoning it in. If there are bad reviews of a Ma concert out there, they assuredly read like Mark Twain’s grumpy and ironic description of opera: “It’s too generous.”

Video

Sunday night’s Kennedy Center Honors offered tributes to Meryl Streep, Neil Diamond, Barbara Cook, Sonny Rollins and Yo-Yo Ma.

More on this Story

• D.C.’s glitziest night of all
• At long last, validation for Neil Diamond
• Neil Diamond, Kennedy Center Honoree
• Barbara Cook, forever carrying a tune

View all Items in this Story

• Barbara Cook, Kennedy Center Honoree
• Yo-Yo Ma, a virtuoso at more than the cello
• Yo-Yo Ma, Kennedy Center Honoree
• Meryl Streep: A life beyond reproach
• Meryl Streep, Kennedy Center Honoree
• Sonny Rollins: A jazz mind in pursuit of improvisational heaven
• Sonny Rollins: Kennedy Center Honoree

Go to YouTube and watch him perform Saint-Saens’s “The Swan,” one of the hoariest chestnuts of the repertoire. The music swells and subsides in long arcs, as if sung in one ecstatic breath. His bow never seems to run out of room, extending the sound seamlessly. His left hand rocks delicately on the strings, making the tone quiver like the voice of someone remembering a very sad story. He’s played it a hundred times, perhaps a thousand times or more. But every note of every phrase feels fresh and meaningful.

Throughout it, Ma never looks at his instrument or at the music, which is all in his head. Instead, he focuses intently on Charles “Lil’ Buck” Riley, a street dancer from Memphis. To the sounds of Ma’s cello, Riley twists on one foot, almost goes up on point, oozes across the floor as if skating on ice, and allows the undulations of Saint-Saens’s haunting melody to flow out to his finger tips and toes. The mesmerizing choreography is equally indebted to Michael Jackson and Anna Pavlova, the great ballerina for whom this was a signature piece. The video, filmed by Spike Jonze at a meeting of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (on which Ma serves), has had more than 1.5 million hits online.