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Yo-Yo Ma performs Johann Sebastian Bach's The Music Garden in one of six hour-long the renowned cellist made in honor of Bach's 313th birthday. The films range in subjects from gardening to ice-dancing to Japanese Kabuki plays, all inspired by six Bach pieces.Cylla von Tiedemann/Associated Press

Taking risks

Celebrated cellist brings composer's suites to a TV audience in six PBS specials

Web posted April 1, 1998

By Mary Campbell
Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Yo-Yo Ma, one of the world's most celebrated cellists, is known for taking creative risks. With a PBS series, he takes yet another. He tackles Bach's six unaccompanied cello suites on television. Now, he makes Bach visual as well as musical.

Under Mr. Ma's risk-taking, each suite mixes with a different art form, from modern dance to modern (and virtual) reality -- just the right collaboration for an audience that Mr. Ma identifies as curious TV viewers who like to make connections.

In Six Gestures, the series' opener, two prominent figure skaters dance on ice to Bach's Sixth Suite, which Mr. Ma lauds as doubly enjoyable -- of music, of graceful movement.

And yet Mr. Ma's still aware of the risk. "You think it may be laughed out of town,'' he concedes. "But I really don't regret one minute of this. I think it was worth it.''

Beginning Wednesday, PBS will broadcast the first two of the cellist's six performances in Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach. The two-hour segments (at 9 p.m. on WEBA, Channel 14, and at 10 p.m. on WCES, Channel 20) include Mr. Ma's recordings for Sony. The performances continue April 8 and 15.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma performs Bach's "Falling Down Stairs" in one of the six hour-long films starring Ma being debuted at Washington's National gallery of Art Saturday, March 21, 1998 in honor of Johann Sebastian Bach's 313th birthday.AP Photo/Cylla von Tiedemann/Rhombus Media Inc.

Also in the first program, actor Tom McCamus relays Bach's background, bits of biography about the 18th-century German composer who made much-admired music for organ, other instruments and singers of church cantatas.

In The Music Garden, Mr. Ma recounts how Bach's First Suite reminds him of nature and how, with a landscape gardener, he tries to plant a "music garden'' between buildings in his hometown, Boston. Despite Mr. Ma's best musical efforts outdoors, the plan fails. But Toronto picks up on the idea, Mr. Ma says, and a garden opens there in September.

For the Third Suite, choreographer Mark Morris creates a dance despite his claims that Bach's music is too perfect. After the avant-garde artist had a nightmare about his dancers falling, he decided he could choreograph Falling Down Stairs.

The Fourth Suite is woven through a play in Sarabande, with Mr. Ma's character, practicing his cello in the back seat of a limousine, responding modestly to the driver's compliments. Mr. Ma is fascinated by how director Atom Egoyan fits music everywhere: "within and outside a concert, in a community, in someone's home, car or office.'' For Mr. Ma, in the story, "the piece of music lives within different people and somehow joins them together in ways they would not be joined otherwise.''

For the Fifth Suite, Mr. Ma enlisted Tamasaburo Bando, a renowned Kabuki actor-dancer from Japan. In that music, Mr. Ma detected "fate, destiny and regret'' -- so appropriate, he added, because "things I've seen Tamasaburo act and dance in have those elements.''

So in Struggle for Hope, Mr. Tamasaburo becomes "a spirit of music'' who grabs Mr. Ma's cello -- and leaves the cellist shaken. "You actually are frightened,'' Mr. Ma insists. "In one action, he has this kind of power. It is amazing.''

For the Second Suite, in The Sound of Carceri, Mr. Ma lands high up, courtesy of virtual reality, on a tiny platform amid computer-generated prisons (carceri) as depicted in architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings from the 18th century. "I was not as far up as it suggests.'' But, he adds, "Occasionally, it got a little dicey.''

The first PBS segment pairs ice dancing and modern dancing; the second matches the play and Kabuki artist. The third moves between the music garden and the etchings in virtual reality.

Mr. Ma obviously likes to extend himself beyond recitals in concert halls. About seven years ago, in what he calls his scariest memory, he headed to the Kalahari Desert to document Bushmen music and trance dances. Now he wants to research Asia's Silk Road of 2,000 years ago -- the overland route for trade, with movements of people as well as religions.

Why? "I like to do things almost a little impossible.''