Yo-Yo Ma: A Disappointing Evening at Davies

The good news is that last night may be the first time in a long time (if ever) that I was aware that every possible seat in Davies Symphony Hall was occupied. The occasion was a visit by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, accompanied at the piano by Kathryn Stott (who plans to retire at the conclusion of this current tour). Sadly, the take at the Box Office may have been the only positive element of the evening.

The program was structured around two major sonata offerings. The first half concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 40 cello sonata in D minor. The program concluded with a less conventional offering. Ma played the solo part in César Franck’s A major violin sonata, most likely without any change in the score except for a shift in register. Ironically, I may have been there for the first recital program that Ma prepared for a tour. I was working in Santa Barbara at the time; and I suspect that the tour had included visits to several of the University of California campuses, Santa Barbara have been selected as one of them. That was a time when I had a violinist neighbor, who had been preparing that sonata for her own recital; and I was not particularly impressed by the idea of a cello moving in on Franck’s turf! Last night I was no more impressed by Ma’s undertaking than I had been when I encountered it a little less than half a century ago.

The Shostakovich offering was no more satisfying. This was one of his earlier works, before his prankish capacity for inventiveness was crippled by the iron hand of Joseph Stalin. Each of the movements of the cello sonata has its own take on a different aspect of high spirits, covering the full scope from the introspection of the Largo through the energetic drive that permeated the fast movements. Sadly, Ma never captured any of those spirits in his performance. The fast movements ran the gamut from too polite to too much affectation, while the Largo was just plain squirm-inducing.

The Franck sonata was preceded by Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel.” This provided a perfectly good example of that composer’s approach to minimalism. It therefore seemed ironic that it was preformed in front of a screen on which were projected “maximal” images conceived by James Webb. The music is short enough that it really requires little more than sit-still-and-listen attention, and “media enhancement” was the last thing that the performance of “Spiegel im Spiegel” required.

The program began with a cycle of five short pieces played without interruption. The set was framed by two works by Gabriel Fauré, his Opus 16 “Berceuse” and the Opus 77 “Papillon.” These enclosed a somewhat inconsistent assortment of pieces by Antonín Dvořák (“Songs My Mother Taught Me”), Sergio Assad (“Menino”), and Nadia Boulanger (“Cantique”). This all made for a muddled diversity, perhaps a warning sign of the muddle that was to follow in the sonata performances.

The rousing applause at the end of the program was followed by unfamiliar encores that were easily forgotten.