Sony Taiwan has packaged eight Yo-Yo Ma DVDs and now offers them as a single box set, complete with a leather-bound diary. None of the items is new, but three of them are masterpieces, three reasonably interesting, and two more or less failures.
The bulk of the collection consists of six films made in the 1990s featuring Ma playing Bach's six cello suites. None is a straightforward performance -- instead, all elaborate on the music in various ways, extending it (you might think) from the music's half hour or less to the 57 minutes or so required for convenient TV screening.
The first is uniquely depressing -- a documentary on the efforts of Ma and a garden designer to persuade the hard-nosed Boston City authorities to commission a public garden inspired by the Suite No:1. They fail, and the project is eventually taken over by Toronto. But long sequences of Boston's and Toronto's windy city centers, plus all those gray men in Boston talking about "the real world," make this a DVD to avoid.
Suite No: 2 isn't much better. Here the plan was to integrate the music with the famous etchings of imaginary prisons by the 18th century engraver Piranesi. These momentous designs are re-created in three dimensions on a computer, and Ma is then shown playing the suite as if perched in a variety of its niches, alcoves and so on. It doesn't work, and everyone appears to have become distraught in the process. At one point even the genial Ma loses his cool and is heard saying "We'll be here all night" and wanting to "get out of here."
A senior recording executive, remarking on it being a "sort of a spiritual thing" while turning up the reverb to levels Ma clearly finds unacceptable, doesn't help matters. An architect, Moshe Safdie, sagely comments that you can't imitate buildings on computers, and it's to this film's credit that his dissenting remarks are left in.
Fortunately the remaining four are a great improvement. The exquisite Suite No: 3 has Ma working with choreographer Mark Morris and his dance troupe. It has the great advantage, unique in the set, of putting the talk in the first half of the film, and then playing the suite uninterrupted, accompanied by the finished dance, in the second. Here at last, you feel, are two genuine artists happily working together.
The fourth DVD consists of a mini-drama centered around a performance Ma is due to give of the relevant suite. The story concerns illness, with four characters who are either dying, suffering psychosomatic symptoms, or trying to persuade the doctor that they're ill. As a drama, it is not a major success, but it nonetheless deserves credit as a serious and honorable attempt.
The fifth suite has Japanese kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando executing a series of dances while Ma plays. They discuss the project beforehand, Bando speaking in Japanese and with only Chinese subtitles available. Ma states his belief that this is the most profound of the suites, and associates it with the death of his father. The dances -- all with Bando playing a female role -- are very strong, and this film is consequently one of the better to come out of this project.
And then suddenly the sixth, entitled Six Gestures, is an overwhelming masterpiece. Its ingredients -- skaters Torvill and Dean, an actor playing Bach, Ma playing the Suite No:6 as a busker -- seem incongruous. But the result is a stupendous success, fabulously moving, and the only breath-taking one in the entire six. About death, love and joy, it was poetically directed by Patricia Rozema, and is highly recommended.
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