There is a particular silence that arrives about forty seconds into the Prelude of the First Suite — Ma has already stated the theme, and then the bow lifts, just for a breath, and you realize you’ve been holding yours.
This is the third time Yo-Yo Ma has recorded the complete Bach Cello Suites. The first was 1983, when he was young and technically ferocious and the world was paying attention. The second was 1997, a more considered traversal that most people consider the definitive one. Then came 2018, and Six Evolutions, and something genuinely different happened.
What Changed
Ma made a deliberate choice to record these sessions across five days in the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas — a hall with a long, warm acoustic tail that becomes almost a seventh instrument across the six suites. Engineer Leslie Ann Jones, whose credits range from jazz to orchestral work and who is one of the finest ears in the business, let that room breathe. The reverb is not manufactured. You can hear the real space.
The performances themselves are slower in places. More considered. Ma talks about these pieces in terms of what they have to say about the natural world, about climate, about what we are doing to the planet — which sounds like the kind of thing that should be annoying, and somehow isn’t. He means it in a structural sense: the suites as ecosystems, each one its own biome, each movement a different organism in relationship with the others.
What you actually hear is a cellist who has lived with this music for over forty years and stopped trying to prove anything.
The Instrument
The cello Ma plays on these sessions is a Domenico Montagnana instrument from 1733, on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation. It is a large-bodied instrument, deeper in resonance than many period cellos, and Leslie Ann Jones placed the microphone close enough that you can hear the body of the instrument as a distinct acoustic presence — the wood itself, almost. The low C string on the Fifth Suite’s Prelude sounds like something geological.
That Fifth Suite is the one to start with, if you haven’t already. It’s written in scordatura — the top string of the cello is retuned down a whole step, which gives the instrument a darker, more shadowed quality throughout. In Ma’s hands it sounds genuinely mournful, unhurried, like a conversation someone is having with themselves late at night. The Sarabande movement is four minutes that will make you reconsider what you think you know about silence and sound and the space between them.
After Hours
I came back to this record after a long stretch away from serious listening. I’d had it around the house — the streaming version, mostly background noise during dinner, which is an absolute crime against it.
Put it on properly and it reconfigures the room. This is not music for multitasking. It asks for the same thing it’s always asked for, which is your full attention, and what it gives back is the sense that someone has been alone with something vast and has come out the other side with their understanding intact.
The Sixth Suite ends with a Gigue that is almost playful, almost, and Ma plays it with what I can only describe as earned lightness. He’s smiled this particular smile before. It just took him sixty years to know what it meant.