There is a version of the Cello Suites that exists only in the space between Yo-Yo Ma’s bow and the microphone, and this is the one that got away from him — and became something better.
Inspired by Bach began as a television project, six films commissioned by the CBC in the mid-1990s, each pairing one of Bach’s Cello Suites with a different art form. A garden designer. A figure skater. A flamenco dancer. A Kabuki theater director. Ma spent years living with the Suites before a single note was recorded, and that residency shows.
The Sessions
The recordings happened across multiple studios and sessions through the late 1990s, with the compilation eventually seeing wider release. Ma worked with producer Wolf Bickel, and the engineering captures something engineers of solo cello recordings rarely achieve: the body of the instrument, not just its voice. You hear the resonance of the spruce top, the room entering the tone just slightly, Ma’s breathing at the phrase endings.
What separates these performances from the studio recordings Ma made for CBS Masterworks in 1983 — already exceptional — is the weight of intention. By the time he recorded these, he had played the Suites publicly hundreds of times, handed them to ice and wood and footwork, watched them survive every translation. He came back to them knowing they could not be broken.
The Suite No. 1 in G Major opens the project, and the Prélude is almost shockingly unhurried. Ma takes the arpeggios at a tempo that lets each chord breathe as a chord, not a flourish. It is a choice that could easily read as self-indulgent, and instead reads as earned.
What Bach Keeps Giving
These six suites were written sometime around 1720, possibly for a five-string instrument, almost certainly never performed publicly in Bach’s lifetime. They spent a century in near-obscurity until Pablo Casals found a copy in a Barcelona music shop in 1889 at age thirteen and spent twelve years learning them before performing even a movement in public. That patience is built into the music’s DNA, and Ma seems to understand this.
The Sarabandes are where Ma makes his case most quietly and most convincingly. The one in Suite No. 5 — written in scordatura, with the top string tuned down a full step — carries a gravity that the other movements only gesture toward. Ma leans into the darkness without dramatizing it.
There is no ensemble here, no conductor, no one to blame or credit. Just a man and an instrument and music that has survived three hundred years of people trying to explain it. The 2006 reissue brought all six recordings into one place, cleaned up and sequenced as Bach intended the suites to be heard — as a complete arc, a single journey taken in six legs.
Put on the Suite No. 3 in C Major after ten at night when the house is quiet.
You will understand why Casals waited twelve years.