Music Review | A Life Well Lived, Thought and Performed, Yo-Yo Ma at the Arlington

Classical music die-hards who prefer the standard concert protocol of music without stage talk had to suspend their bias in order to take in what legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma had to offer in his latest visit to town, at the Arlington on Saturday, April 5. And the suspension was for a noble and fascinating cause — a journey into this expansive thinking musician’s mind and heart. He uses both in ways that resemble his instrumental virtuosity.

Ma’s hybrid recital, interspersed with extensive detours into his life story and humanistic philosophy, aided by multimedia visuals and an affable tête-à-tête with author Samin Nosrat (Salt Fat Acid Heat), was a unique and moving experience. Dubbed An Evening with Yo-Yo Ma, Reflections in Words and Music, this was also the latest of many Ma appearances hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures, under the guidance of soon-to-retire director Celesta Billeci.

A running theme of Ma’s “reflections” related to his own humility in the service of humanity linked to what Nosrat called a “moral beauty.” Ma quoted cellist Pablo Casals in seeking the goal of making “art not for art’s sake, but for life’s sake,” noting that music is “medicine to help us to seek truth, build trust, and act in service.”

After playing George Crumb’s “Sonata for Rostropovich” — the closest thing to a thornily dissonant piece on this night — Ma talked about his early years leading into his musical life. He commented that he struggled with his father’s insistence on both obedience and being a great musician, feeling that he couldn’t be both. After his early teacher Leon Kirchner hailed young Ma’s musical abilities, but warned, “You haven’t found your sound,” young Ma went on a vision quest.

Citing his long-held interest in music from different cultures and genres, Ma then delved into a tapestry of musical snippets, from Piazzolla’s new tango to Brazilian music, from folkloric “fiddling” to snatches of Bach, and, in American music mode, from Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” to “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and Dvořák’s New World Symphony. This is the same Ma instrumental inspiration in founding the globally conscious Silkroad Ensemble. Capping off his mini “world tour” of musical resources, Ma surmised “I was not looking for my own sound. I was looking for our sound, as a species.”

Among the many projects and merits of Ma’s musical saga, he has been closely aligned with and much praised for his measured and passionate relationship with the towering Bach Cello Suites (all six of which he performed in a single Granada Theatre performance several years ago). It can be reported that the Suites were the deepest touchstone of the Arlington performance/presentation, a source to which he repeatedly turned when giving examples of his musical wisdom and ethos.

The longest purely musical stretch on Saturday came with a complete performance of the Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor, suitably sad and wary in a global moment of anxiety. Without naming names or circumstances, Ma may have slyly addressed Trump-era angst with the observation that “nature is creative, but is it also terrifying. So are we.” He then grinned, adding, “I usually like to think the other guy is more destructive.”

Extra-musical connections arose with his Bach moments, at one point making a reference to a year he spent performing the suites around the world, often in underdeveloped areas. He also performed Bach in the newly and miraculously rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, with pristine, slowly embracing film footage from the rebirthed interior on the screen.

A standalone mournful Sarabande somehow felt, topically, like an elegy for the misdeeds of the current Presidential administration — an extension of the massive protest of the “Hands Off” project, which registered with thousands of people in Santa Barbara earlier that day.

Ma referred to Bach as “a bedrock and a seedbed,” whose music is “both empathetic and objective, sacred and secular. He is both an artist and a scientist.”

The sentiment provided a natural segue into the dialogue portion of the evening, as he brought out the thoughtful author, cook, and thinker Nosrat. She spoke of the importance of awe in life. “A bit of awe every day can lead to a better life,” she noted, and Ma picked up on the theme, gesturing out at the sold-out house and noting that “the community of what we’re doing here is both sacred and secular. I can feel the spirit passing on.” Nosrat later referred to the evening as an example of “collective effervescence.”

Among other musical pieces folded into the latter part of the night, Ma mimicked the eerily “awesome” sound of humpback whales, recorded in the 1970s by Roger Payne, and a sublime late-breaking passage in which he played Arvo Pärt’s landmark minimal piece Spiegel im Spiegel  — utterly simple of means, and utterly bewitching in effect — with stunningly crisp imagery of the universe via the Hubble and other modern telescopes filling the screen and our cosmic imaginations.

At evening’s end, Ma commented, “I wish we had a world wisdom bank. We need a planetary humanism, where every individual gives dignity to every other human.” As a final humanizing touch, Nosrat had the audience collectively recite the immortal text of Margaret White Brown’s classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. It was one of those kinds of nights, full of a complicated awe you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but implicitly felt.