Yo-Yo's Way with the Strings

At 25, Cellist Ma awes critics and colleagues alike

The scene must have looked like something being staged for a Fassbinder movie. The whiz of Volkswagens streaming along the Autobahn slowed down as drivers ogled the spectacle at the side of the road. There sat a Peugeot with a blown-out tire, and perched on a suitcase near by sat a bespectacled Chinese youth serenely playing Haydn on his cello.

"People couldn't believe what they were seeing," recalls Yo-Yo Ma, 25, but to him it was natural. He had a concert in Frankfurt that night, then a flight to a recording date in London, and while waiting for help, Ma decided to brush up on his Haydn. The dedication is typical for Ma; so is the hectic schedule (125 concerts this year) and the cheerful indifference to adversity. The silky beauty of his playing awes not only critics but other musicians. Isaac Stern, the virtuoso of violin and musical politics, says: "Ma is one of the greatest instrumental talents alive."

Some are born great, some have greatness thrust upon them, and some have fathers like Hiao-tsiun Ma. A musical pedagogue who migrated from China to Paris in the '30s, Papa Ma started teaching Yo-Yo (Yo means friendship in Chinese) at the age of four, with a 1/16-size cello. Yo-Yo had to memorize two new measures for each daily lesson. "I had to play right," Yo-Yo recalls. "If I made a mistake, then I would have to play the passage right three consecutive times."

At five Yo-Yo played easily three of the Bach suites that lesser mortals have grown gray practicing. At seven he was brought to New York, where his father had been offered a job teaching at a school that Stern's children attended. Connections were made. Yo-Yo performed on the Johnny Carson show. He was taken to play for Pablo Casals. "What are you doing with this child?" demanded the patriarch. "You must let him go and play on the street."

Nobody gets to Carnegie Hall that way. Yo-Yo was taken to the Juilliard School and enrolled with Leonard Rose.

"He was very small and already quite extraordinary," says Rose, himself a cellist of the first rank. Yo-Yo's technique was impeccable, and then an inner quality, unteachable, began to develop. "When he was about 17," says Rose, "he gave a performance of Schubert's Arpeggione, which is a holy terror for cellists, and it was so gorgeous I was moved to tears."

Ma's only weakness--if it is a weakness--is that his tone is relatively small.

It is supremely elegant but lacks the sonorous grandeur that audiences have come to admire in a Piatigorsky or a Rostropovich. Some might attribute this to the French tradition of string playing, but it may also be due to a congenital curvature of Ma's spine. Complex surgery last spring corrected the condition.

At 15, when Yo-Yo first left home to go to a summer music camp, he ran into difficulties. "I became totally disorganized," he says. Even back at Juilliard and later at the Marlboro Music Festival, he "acted crazy and silly." He would go to sleep on tables, get drunk, play pranks. The solution was, of all things, to be shipped off to Harvard. There, in addition to studying music, he could meander in and out of Dostoyevsky, sociobiology, German literature.

That eclecticism helps to differentiate Ma from other prodigies. He likes to do calligraphy and play chess. He is reading Don Quixote. He brings the same sense of exploration to the cello repertoire: he has performed such oddities as the concerti of Dmitri Kabalevsky and Gerald Finzi, plus his own transcription of the Brahms D minor violin sonata.

Ma is concertizing in Europe now, and top orchestras are signing him up well into the '80s. He remains an artist-in-residence at Harvard, where his wife Jill, 27, teaches German. Last fall they played host at an old-fashioned waltz party in Leverett House. Yo-Yo spent the evening sawing away at Strauss in the student orchestra.

Says he: "Good music is good music." -

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