Cello Sweets, Old and Very New

On a recent Sunday afternoon at The Granada Theatre, the stage was occupied for a couple of inspired hours by a lone cellist, unaccompanied and unamplified. This wasn’t any cellist, but the eminent and yet humanely approachable Yo-Yo Ma. What he delivered more than amply filled the stage and a packed house of hearts and minds. 

Luckily for us, Ma has been a familiar face and presence in Santa Barbara for many years, thanks to his deep ties to UCSB Arts & Lectures, especially to its now-retired director, Celesta Billeci. His last appearance here, at the Arlington in 2024, was a seamlessly mixed menu of music, autobiography, and philosophy. This year’s model was something special in a different direction, as he performed mostly new works. For good historical and stylistic balance, he also included a refreshing, partially dissonant dose of early modernism from a composer not listed on the original program, Paul Hindemith, with his compact yet spicy Cello Sonata for Solo Cello. Ma topped it all off with perhaps his greatest, a Bach cello suite.

The concert opened on a gently spirited and very American note and medley, combining Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz with the Native American sounds of “Honor Song,” written by Yo-Yo Ma & Jeremy Dutcher, and a run-through a left-of-classical favorite, “Over the Rainbow.” 

After the Harold Arlen classic, by way of a personal and attitudinal introduction to the concert, Ma addressed the audience, first quoting the song: “‘If a bluebird can fly, why can’t I?’ This was a song of hope in 1938. I’m full of hope … because of that, we’re going to try this experiment, with three new pieces. I am an immigrant, and the great immigrant is music. It travels, and it belongs to us wherever we go.”

 South African cellist and composer Abel Selacoe, all of 34, gave Ma something to work out on with the bright-spirited, extended technique-fueled, and, yes, hopeful new piece Ramblings of Modisma. Plucking and strumming were part of the vocabulary of the rhythmically charged score. At one point, Ma deployed vigorous bowing across all strings, incorporating harmonics, bass notes, and an etched melody. But the real heart and meat of the piece was about musicality rather than instrumental novelty.

Ma extended beyond his very instrument for Caroline Shaw’s lovely process piece When, after Maya Angelou, through which the composer subtly flies into the audience-participatory engagement, explained through the section names — a shared tone, a shared pulse, a shared song. 

The fresh produce portion of the show included the world premiere of Edu-Matiere-(Water-Matter) by the fast-rising composer Camille Pépin (b. 1990), who had flown over from France to be in the house for its first performance. No doubt, she was pleased. Grounded in but stretching beyond a post-minimalist language, her five-part piece proposes a fluid, mesmerizing arc of languid, rapid, ghostly, and cautiously resolving atmospheres. Ma gave the piece a sensitive and persuasive birth in the Granada. We can say we were there when….

For the Bach Cello Suite of choice, Ma dove into and lived in the last of the set, Suite No. 6, bringing his usual impeccable technical aplomb and his will to inhabit the specific essence of each distinct dance movement. Among the cellist’s many Santa Barbaran concerts, he once performed all six suites and tends to always pack at least one in his programmatic suitcase, whatever the context. The master’s touch is always at the ready, but never played in rote fashion.

For an encore at the Granada, Ma paid respects to an early hero, the late, great Pablo Casals, with a sweet-toned reading of the Casals-arranged Catalan folk song “El Cant dels Ocells” (“The Song of the Birds”). Its bird-like effects attached, circling back to the bluebird reference in “Over the Rainbow.” 

He quoted Casals, who described himself as “a human first, a musician second, and a cellist third.” The same could be said of Ma, as evidenced once again in his latest 805 visitation.