ALBUMS

YO-YO MA - INSPIRED BY BACH
(Sony Classical)

Sometimes music that change the way we listen drifts into ones way; music like, Sainte Colombe´s pieces for Viola da Gamba, Agon by Stravinsky or choir music by Ligeti, which may appear unmelodic and unaccessible or even ugly at a casual hearing, but soon reveals strong emotional and timeless beauty, vaguely modernistic in character. I would place Bach´s six suites for unaccompanied cello among the music with such qualities.

In 1985 Yo-Yo Ma made his first recording of the six Bach suites for unaccompanied cello. That recording won almost every price and award in the book and it was well deserved, indeed. It is actually a recording you just have to hear if you are interested in music that goes far beyond the immediately comprehensive.

Yo-Yo Ma began learning the Bach suites when he was four years old, two measures at a time, from his father. Mr. Ma says that he has been inspired by the cello suites intellectual, emotional and spiritual power ever since.

Inspired by his participation in an symposium by Mark Wolf in Boston on the theologian, physician, musician and Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer 1991, Yo-Yo Ma started a new project related to Bach´s suites. Schweitzer described Bach as a painterly or pictorial composer and articulated a visual quality of Bach´s music. The new recording of the six Bach suites is a result of that symposium.

Yo-Yo Ma has explored the suites in collaboration with artists from other disciplines, including imaginary conversations with the 18th century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Each artist worked with Yo-Yo Ma for about two years and together they sought the musical essence of each suite and the explored how that essence could be expressed in another artistic form. The collaborations were filmed to create a six-part film series.

The first suite are an exploration of themes related to nature i collaboration with garden designer Juliet Moir Messervy.
The second suite explores spaces and perspectives in the work of Piranesi. As captured by film director Francois Girard.
For the third suite Mark Morris choreographed a new dance.
Film director Atom Egoyan created a film in which music is the link between characters for the fourth suite.
Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando explored themes of pathos and transcendence for the fifth suite.
For the sixth suite, ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skated a celebratory cosmic dance.

Bach composed the six suites for unaccompanied cello during his Köthen years (1717-1723) although their first impulses goes back to his Weimar period (1708-1717). The earliest copies was made by Bach´s second wife Anna Magdalena in the late 1720´s.

At the time the violin was uncontested as a solo instrument already in the 17th century, the violoncello had just begun to establish itself as a soloist instrument next to the viola de gamba.

Bach conceived the first five suites for violoncello, whereby he prescribed scordatura in the fifth suite. This technique requires the A-string to be tuned down to G and had previously only been used on the violin. It permits unusual chords and also modifies the tone colors by the shifting of the open strings. The sixth suite was written for a five-stringed instrument with an extra top string tuned to E, which has yet to be identified. It might have been a violoncello with an added string, the viola pomposa which was held on the arm or, most likely, for a violoncello piccolo.

The six suites for violoncello by Bach are considered by many as the most challenging pieces in the solo repertoire. Nowdays Bach´s suites are generally performed in what may be seen as either Baroque or Romantic musical tradition depending on the interpreter. Before 1985, when Yo-Yo Ma made his first recording of the suites, almost every performance of the suites were in the Romantic tradition; performed in a fast danceable tempo built on melodic structures and added melodic frills rather than thematic structures.

In 1985 with the release of Yo-Yo Ma´s recording of the Suites, a new way of interpreting the music was born in the manner in which he brought the music back to the Baroque tradition in which it originally may have been written. Mr. Ma emphasized its spareness, slowed down the tempo and let melodic themes evolve from repetition, rather than avoiding monotony with added frills at the end of every forth measure, which interpretations in the Romantic tradition prescribes. Yo-Yo Ma utilized the monotony in each piece of the suites, to bring the structural complexity of the music, which was somewhat shaded in former adaptations, into a value of it´s own.

Yo-Yo Ma´s new recording may be a another landmark in future interpretations of Bach´s cello suites. The tempo of the new recording are slightly faster compared to his former recording. Yet the interpretation builds even more on structural themes which makes the music seem contemplative with a sombre touch. The themes are accentuated, slowly deconstructed and are finally brought into new shapes without loosing the music of Bach. This underlines the visual and filmic qualities in Bach´s music; the solid core of perception may not be as solid as it appear. Hear for instance the fine tuned interaction between Atom Egoyan´s visual theme of generosity in personal relationships reshapes in Yo-Yo Ma´s skillful internalization of Egoyan´s visual emotions into Bach´s music in the forth suite. Gradually the themes are broken into fragments, like the torn sail on a ship caught in a tempest.

Over the past eight years I have listened to various interpretations of the six Bach suites. This recording by Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most contemporary, in such ways that it seems to capture the now notorious eclecticism of the late twentieth century both in performance and in it´s aim to span across expressions in different disciplines of art.