The conductor is trying to melt into the floor, and Yo-Yo Ma isn’t letting him.
It takes a lot to make maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto blush, but on Monday night at Orchestra Hall, Ma, 67 years young, has him somewhere between bubble gum and fuchsia. After performing Edward Elgar’s tortured cello concerto with the Chicago Symphony, Ma announced that it was Prieto’s 25th wedding anniversary — to former ballerina Isabel Mariscal, sitting with their teenage son on the main floor — and “he still came here to conduct tonight!” (Quick cut to Prieto, hiding behind his hands.)
In gratitude, Ma dedicated Pablo Casals’ “Song of the Birds,” the evening’s encore, to Prieto, a nod to his Spanish heritage. But it carried a double meaning: the outspoken Casals adapted the folk song for cello as a plea for his native Catalonia, after civil war engulfed Spain. Ma, who similarly leverages his musical platform toward pacifism, didn’t need to convince the audience of the encore’s timeliness.
“Birds know no political boundary. They know freedom — the freedom to sing and speak our hearts,” Ma told the audience.
Those sentiments might seem insincere from any other artist. As would bear-hugging two CSO principal strings after the Elgar, or boyishly dispersing a bouquet of roses, intended for him, throughout the orchestra. But it’s Yo-Yo Ma. So, of course everything was just as genuine as the evening’s encore: a precious, fragile prayer, stirring and serene, as if delicately cradled in cupped hands. It made supplicants of us all.
But the Elgar which preceded it scattered doubtful seeds and let them sprout. The same gruff tone and swashbuckling bow flourishes that have dampened the cellist’s previous solo CSO appearances were noticeable going on predictable in the evening’s marquee work. The hellfire brio that has become Ma’s signature was often plainly out of step with the concerto’s more introspective movements, his bow sometimes skydiving onto the strings or blasting off during otherwise pensive cadences. And the thing about portamento — the expressive slides you’ll hear between notes — is that it’s kind of like gravy: delicious, to be sure, but ideally not dousing what’s written underneath.
Ma plays the same way he moves through the world: earnestly, and unapologetically. I challenge you to find anyone among Orchestra Hall’s full house on Monday who wouldn’t cite some variation of that as the basis of their glowing admiration for Ma. And no one would contest that Ma’s Elgar was passionately relayed. What he was trying to relay was, to me, less clear.
Not helping matters: Ma’s CSO showing is one of several back-to-back, one-night-only Elgar engagements across the U.S., the cellist taking on each with different conductors and ensembles. Admirably — and typically, for the globe-trotting Ma — the ensemble roster features everything from international eminences to regional orchestras; the South Bend Symphony, for example, is up next. But with just a day between many of those concerts, and no repeats, one has to imagine the allotted rehearsal time is pretty much perfunctory.
Ma knows the Elgar like an old friend, however casually greeted. And he knows few orchestras as intimately as the CSO, where he served as creative consultant for nearly a decade. Even so, matters of ensemble, balance in the hall and collective interpretation were still getting acquainted during the Elgar — luscious orchestral backings when Ma was going for something gauzier, a couple blobby tutti entrances. There’s a reason it’s called quality time, but during Monday’s performance, Ma and the CSO played like they’d shared very little of it this week.
Prieto’s traversal of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 was more understated yet essential, like a tour guide whisking you away to treasured haunts hiding in plain sight. It was a safe route, to be sure — this wasn’t a testing ground for provocative tempos, nor a romp through the orgasmic boundary between control and loss of it — but a scenic one. Strings played inner sixteenth motors with crackling crispness; elsewhere, with rounded, poised gestures, Prieto urged players to give notes their full, gleaming value where other conductors might insert a nib of space.
Though the unusual Monday concert all but ensured an offbeat rehearsal schedule for the Tchaikovsky, too, this was a fully conceived, engaged account from first to last. Especially noteworthy were solo turns from the CSO’s ever-excellent assistant principals: woodwinds John Bruce Yeh (clarinet), Lora Schaefer (oboe) and Bill Buchman (bassoon), exquisitely melancholic in the wistful Andantino, and Vadim Karpinos (timpani), opting for a lean, balletic sound handsomely tailored to Prieto’s interpretation.
Us crustaceans — I mean, critics — typically slip out seconds after double-bar to get ahead of the evening’s crowds. (Morning deadlines, yadda yadda.) Monday’s concert obviously drew a full house, so I, too, pounced just after the roaring end of the Tchaikovsky.
But as I charged my way up the stairs of the lower balcony, I chanced a glance at the hundreds upon hundreds of faces beaming toward the stage, perhaps the fullest the hall has been this season. Dotted among them: a handful of wide-eyed kids, squeezed into the faux-adult formalwear of someone who’s just braved their first night at the symphony. And who, judging by the gigawatt grins on their faces, loved every second of it.
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So, I’ll nitpick, and pinch. I’ll try to stow away my personal feelings about an artist’s humanity at coat check and be as honest as I can, even when it aches. But I wouldn’t be making good on that promise if I didn’t hasten to add: I’m grateful we have an artist like Yo-Yo Ma in our midst.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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