It ought to be easy to hate Yo-Yo Ma. He plays the cello with such purity and intensity that he is among the world's most wanted classical soloists. From the Silk Road to Kalahari bushmen, cellist Yo-Yo Ma is constantly breaking boundaries, writes Arminta Wallace.
On the ensemble front, he performs regularly with the most respected of his colleagues, names as near to legend as classical music can get - Barenboim, Stern, Ax - and is a messianic promoter of new work from the contemporary stable.
So far, so strictly ballroom. But there's more. Yo-Yo Ma is cool. Remember the videos of the Bach cello suites, when he collaborated with an architect, a garden designer and a kabuki actor, among others, to produce a series of stunning television images? The hypercello, a digitally enhanced instrument straight out of Star Wars, which he developed in conjunction with the boffins from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his home town of Boston? The Silk Road Project, the enormous multinational undertaking which he set up in the year 2000 to give a voice to musicians from the ancient transcontinental trade route: composers, percussionists, folk musicians from India, Tibet and central Asia? Not to even mention the recordings: Hush, with the singer Bobby "Don't Worry, Be Happy" McFerrin; Appalachia Waltz, with the Texas fiddler Mark O'Connor; Piazzolla: Soul of the Tango; a grand total of 14 Grammys, and counting. To top it all, he looks ridiculously young despite being almost 50.
Oh, yes, it ought to be easy to hate Yo-Yo Ma. If you've never met him, that is. The world-famous superstar strolls into the foyer of the National Concert Hall, (where he performs tonight), dressed in cords and a jumper, priceless cello strapped to his back like an overgrown backpack.
He poses obligingly for pictures, doesn't hesitate for a second when asked to clamber, cello in hand, up on to a stool, doesn't protest as the photographer creeps closer and closer until the camera is inches from his knees. Within seconds they are discussing something involving megawatts. When we settle down for the interview, it is he who pours the tea - and asks the first question. What, he wants to know, am I working on? I tell him I've been reading a fantastic book about Antarctica. Yes, but what does it say about Antarctica, he wants to know. "Well, it begins with an essay on white . . ." He produces a notebook, jots down the title of the book and the name of the author and checks the spelling. It's easy to see why audiences adore Yo-Yo Ma. He is genuinely interested and totally at ease.
Yo-Yo Ma began to study the cello at the age of four, in Paris, where his Chinese parents had settled. His father - a composer and musicologist as well as a violinist - began teaching his son to play the Bach cello suites, two bars at a time. Why? Ma grins broadly. "He had lots of progressive ideas about music education - and my sister and I were his guinea pigs. He loved Bach, but he also believed that so much in music is based on what is regular and what is irregular. It's a code. You set up a strategy, and then you prepare for the thing that is exceptional; and Bach is one of the composers who is a master at knowing when to do something unexpected.
"Of course," he adds, "what was nice for a four-year-old was that some days were really easy, thanks to the repetition. When something is only a little different, it becomes a nice game. As a kid you absorb things without being analytical - and once you have absorbed the thing, it's yours forever. That's what I treasure greatly, you know? Once you're in possession of something, the way it grows within you, the way it can incorporate new knowledge, new circumstances, new information."
A more recent, but equally profound, influence on his musical development was his trip to Namibia in the early 1990s to make a TV documentary about the Bushmen of the Kalahari, inspired by a film he saw about a blind desert musician while he was studying anthropology at Harvard.
Even now, he waxes lyrical about the experience. "It was really scary. I remember saying goodbye to my wife, and there was no contact, no . . ." He shrugs. "It was one of the biggest influences in my whole life." What impressed him was the vastness of the landscape, the simplicity and strangeness of the culture and the "trance dance", a nine-hour ritual which combines clapping and rhythmic dancing around a circle of fire and culminates in a laying-on of hands, a healing ceremony.
"What I saw in this ritual was really a template for medicine, for religion, for art, culture and community. It was all there. And I remember thinking: 'This is as powerful as Beethoven's Ninth, or The Rite of Spring.' Next day I interviewed one of the women who was doing the clapping, and I said: 'Why do you do this?' And her answer was: 'Because it gives us meaning.' Now, I haven't heard a better or more concise way of describing all of these activities."
Ma gave his first public recital at the age of five, a not unusual beginning for a career as classical prodigy. Yet he has never remained within the confines of the classical tradition. Was this a conscious decision, on his part, to break out? "Well, we all know internally what a centre is," he says, "whether it's the centre of our profession or the centre of ourselves. All our lives we're somehow circling round that centre, maybe in a spiral. So from my own centre - personal self, as opposed to professional - everything I do makes sense."
A merry chuckle strips this statement of any hint of pomposity. "What my training makes me do is ask the following questions about any music: who's doing it, and why? If it's written music, what is its internal world, what is its context, and what is the motivation that makes somebody bother to put something down on paper? Or if it's aural tradition, why does anybody care enough to pass it on? This is what I'm constantly engaged in trying to figure out.
"I went and took lessons from one of the Silk Road percussionists, because he lived in Cuba and Brazil and he knows about the West African influences on that music. And to hear him talk about what the Cuban masters talked to him about, how you can flip a rhythm so you're riding the horse backwards, or how he thinks about phrasing, is a very graphic way of describing something that in classical music sometimes becomes very abstract. Or there's a jazz pianist I work with who'll say: 'A jazz quartet is not four people playing together, it's four people who have four different grooves, and they're fighting each other on the grooves and that's what actually gives the music its strength.' I've gradually realised that these are the very things that one does with Schubert, Beethoven and Shostakovich. Only the vocabulary is different."
The programme he and pianist Kathryn Stott will play in Dublin tonight is unconventional in its own way: Debussy, Fauré, Messiaen and Franck.
"It's funny, isn't it? A British pianist and a generic Asian-American playing French music - what gives? Well, Kathy is very much tuned into Fauré, was one of the few people to celebrate his 150th anniversary by having a huge festival in Manchester, so that's her tradition, and she encouraged me to play his sonatas. Well, this programme actually represents some of my earliest musical memories - my father playing chamber music in Paris, my mother, who was a soprano, singing Massenet."
A Chinese-American who moved from Paris to New York, now lives in Boston and works with musicians from Iran, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan who have, he says, become friends. What, I can't resist asking, do they - and what does he - make of the war? He groans. "I think we're all agreed that we don't want war. But I wish that somehow the different engines of our world - the economic engine, the political engine, the cultural engine - could all move forward together. When I think of Baghdad, I go right back to fourth grade; the Babylonians, and an 8,000-year history. Politically, that doesn't matter very much. Culturally, it matters a lot. I wish the cultural engine were stronger. But then, I'm not a politician." Maybe he should be, I muse gloomily. Maybe cellists should run the world. He erupts into laughter. "No. Definitely not. If cellists ran the world, it would be a horrible place."
Yo-Yo Ma perfoms at the NCH, Dublin tonight as part of the NCH/Irish Times Celebrity series
