"What am I supposed to take away from this?"

... that you don't know much about Yo Yo Ma

"... that you don't know much about Yo Yo Ma"

Thanks Jeff. This is why we read blogs. To read the idiotic teaching the uninformed. (emoticon to show I'm joking).

You're supposed to think that Yo-Yo Ma should stick to his own bailiwick, classical music, and stop fooling around with all those other types of music. He is demeaning his talent and attention by fooling around with bluegrass and tango and that Silk Road crap. Stick to Bach and the little pigeonhole the critic prefers sticking him in.

Bottom line, Ma has too much fun with his music. That's not "serious."

I could totally kick that pansy Yo Yo Ma's ass at traditional Kyrgyz music. Where does he get off being so popular?

That this guy knows a lot about Ma, and classical music, and Kyrgyz folk music -- and you don't.

What I took away from it is (a) that the writer thinks yo yo ma isn't actually the world's best cellist; (b) that he thinks that yo yo ma is a decent *generalist* but that, in any particular genre in which cellists might play, someone else is better.

What am I supposed to take away from this

I dunno about you, but it helped me figure out just how pretentious Mark Swed is.

Well, my takeaway is that the LAT isn't employing competent line or copy editors: it should be either "more authentically than him" or "more authentically than he *does*."

One of the hallmarks of a great musician is their versatility. You're expected to play Bach and Brahms, and play that literature well. But if that's all you do, well, honey, there are about 30,000 other cellists who play these just as well as you do.

The idea is to master as much music, in as many differing eras, as possible. It's an incredibly harsh field, similar to being a professional athlete who is also on a NSF fellowship for their doctoral degree. You have to be physically strong, well-practiced in the traditional and contemporary repetoires, and smart as hell. The dumb ones and the weak ones burn out, the lazy ones flame out fast (don't practice enough).

Back to the reviewer: He's saying there are better cellists out there than Yo-Yo, who is amazing, but he's not in his 30s any more either.

Life is harsh, and music is a 30-40 year-olds' game (Experience & Maturity count, but so does strength and smarts).

Hope this helps.

I think it means that Lee Siegel is now writing under the pseudonym "Mark Swed."

quite a bit actually:

the meaning if the first remark is especially pointed -- even though Carter's Cello Concerto was written for Yo Yo Ma (and presumably written to his strengths), other people play it better.

the other references were to idioms that Yo Yo Ma has slummed in.

Can somebody knowledgable help me out here?

Be glad to, Kevin. The world's greatest cellist is Mstislav Rostropovich. The second greatest is Lynn Harrell. Yo-Yo Ma is a hotdogger compared to these two. That's all you need to know.

I think it's a music critic pointing out that the best known ("Most popular") cellist is not necessarily the greatest artist, and that in sub-genres there are specialists who are equally good. We might answer, "so what," because Ma is superb in his own right and certainly far better than the first chair of the Des Moines Symphony or lots of other cellists who do solo work on occasion. I have heard him in solo performance in a small hall and he is superb. So was Rostropovich when I heard him perform.

There is lots of good music and there are lots of good musicians, and you don't have to be the Superbowl Champion of Cello to give a good performance. Or to put it another way, Kent Nagano's interpretation of Parsifal at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera was among the best performances I have ever heard, and it does not detract from Munich or Chicago in the least to say so.

Well, Elliot Carter is a contemporary composer whose cello concerto is one of the most difficult (both for the performer and listener) pieces in the repertoire. So the statement about the Finn's ability to make it "sound like music" probably means that's he's able to penetrate the rather noisy surface of the piece, and bring out its more universal aspects. In any case, any LAT article that reference Elliot Carter is clearly catering to a hyper-musical (one might say hyper-pompous) audience -- it is not music that many casual listeners will enjoy.

Kevin,

Yo yo is a academic fellow who is interested in different types of music whether it be straight classical or a Brazilian tango. These interests are also heavily exploited by the recording profession, thus all sorts of stuff marketed. It's no different than opera singers warbling spirituals.

sm

Yo-Yo Ma is a great technical player, and a very good cellist. Others play with more "musicality" or soul. I prefer the late Jacqueline Du Pre for musicality, especially in a piece like the Dvorak cello concerto.

However, he has done a tremendous amount to popularize classical music, and I believe he is branching out into other areas because he wants to expand his music. Other can play Kyrgyz folk music better, but few coul bring it to a larger audience the way Yo-Yo Ma can. Also, he was on Mister Roger's neoghborhood.

I'm guessing Yo-Yo Ma just needs to try harder or get better composers to write music for him.

"Can somebody knowledgable help me out here? What am I supposed to take away from this?"

I would say that Mr. Swed was spending some time bopping to Paganini, got a call from his editor about the deadline, said, "oh sh*t!" Jumped on his laptop, look down at the brochure showing Ma, said, "Ah ha! Hate that cross-over sh*t." and wrote a hit piece one hour before deadline.

At least Anssi Karttunen never left his Stradivarius in a NYC taxicab.

It's just typical snobbish critical contrarianism: If it's popular, it must suck.

Sorry, but I loved Silk Road Journeys.

BTW, the Kyrgyz music reference was likely an allusion to Yo-Yo Ma's involvement in the Silk Road Project.

http://www.silkroadproject.org/
(Sorry, forgot how to do hyperlinks.)

Seems the guy conducted master classes in Kazakhstan and it's not a stretch to assume he's incorporated Kyrgyz music into some performances.

And may I say the er-hu is a beautiful instrument.

You all hit all the points.

Nothing to add here -- and you all suffer how I love to babble about music :)

Eliot Carter is indeed an extremely abstruse composer, and it's quite a thing to say another cellist plays a work written for Ma better than Ma does.

It does sort of sound like critical overreach ...

Bob

Professional musicians and competent critics hear all sorts of things that I miss. I think Brat just about has it right. Stars like Ma play an important role--in his case, partly because some of his projects attract listeners who wouldn't normally think of trying something "classic"--or some classical types who wouldn't think of going Kyrgyz.

There used to be a relatively few star concert pianists, who often were characters (and often played pretty sloppily/colorfully/whatever). These days, fewer stars, more competence, maybe less color.

And the writer sounds snotty.

By all means, avoid post-modern literary criticism; it uses even worse obfuscatory verbiage. Nathan makes the point, Ma commissioned the piece from Carter who would, supposedly, have listened to Ma perform and written to his strengths. However, Carter, one of America's finest living composers, writes extremely difficult music and relatively few can play it well.
Ma is most respected for dealing with old musical masters rather than contemporary works. Ma recorded an attempted crossover piece called Appalachian Journey, one probably better avoided by serious music listeners.

Mark this well folks as a red letter day for you will not see me say the following often...

I completely agree with Nathan on this.

This read to me as a full on body slam attack on the musical ability of Ma intended to make clear to the musical "intelligentsia" able to understand such fine distinctions as this critic is making just how much Ma sucks in the view of this reviewer. This was a very snarky pompously written (In my view anyway, you can be very pompous without it being as overt as some people perceive pomposity needing to be) hit piece, why I have no idea. Nathan though hit on what was clearly the core element of it, which is why I have to completely agree with him on this one. When you say others do better something specifically designed for that specific person under critique you are saying to that person you can't even do best something made for you to be best at within your field of expertise. That is extremely harsh, extremely pointed, and to my eyes this piece was incredibly intellectually pretentious in how it went about doing this hit piece.

I thought Yo Yo Ma was a black guy with a stutter, insulting the maternal side of your family.....

I may be dating myself, but a similar point used to be made that Jon Vickers performed Peter Grimes better than Peter Pears, for whom the part was written. I heard Vickers once in the role, and he was tremendous, and never heard Pears, but I suspect the point probably had something to it.

But it was never made in quite as catty a way as this article seems to be making its point about Yo-yo Ma. I've never heard Ma, but he certainly seems to be able to arouse audience (and student) enthusiasm, and not by cheap means.

Sorry, but anyone who thinks that Appalachian Journey should be avoided by "serious music listeners" has no taste in any genre of music, and probably doesn't understand the genre he prefers.

Music critics who listen to only classical (or jazz, or rock, etc.) have nothing worthwhile to say.

This read to me as a full on body slam attack on the musical ability of Ma intended to make clear to the musical "intelligentsia" able to understand such fine distinctions as this critic is making just how much Ma sucks in the view of this reviewer.

I think not. Reading the whole review, which was far more positive with only a few minor negative notes, I think it was more the ritual "I'm not a fan" demonstration that many reviewers feel they need to do before writing a generally positive review (strangely, few seem to feel a parallel need to write an "I'm not a hater" lead in to a generally negative review, apparently, a review must contain a minimum quota of negativity, but not positivity.)

It perhaps needs to be said here that Mark Swed is one of the two or three finest newspaper classical music critics in the country - he is much more reliable than anyone at the New York Times, for example.

His opinion here is provocative, but it's also the case that the publicity for Yo-Yo Ma means that other great cellists are often unfairly overlooked. Yo-Yo Ma will certainly survive Swed's comments and readers will probably be encouraged to broaden their knowledge of contemporary cellists.

I had a whole angry screed about classical music afficianados taking themselves much too seriously, but this guy said it it all:

"Bottom line, Ma has too much fun with his music. That's not "serious."
Posted by: gmoke on October 30, 2006 at 7:15 PM |

Seems to me like someone who knows a helluva lot about classical taking a swipe at the (possibly) most popular classical musician in the world.

All I know is that my mother told me Pablo Casals was the greatest cellist EVER!

My experience with Mark Swed is that the actual quality of a given performance is more or less inversely proportional to the level of enthusiasm evident in his review of it. So, without having heard the performance, I would say that Yo-Yo really is the greatest cellist since, well, ever - but if it's true that the review was mostly positive he must have been having an off night.

"Others play bluegrass, tangos and Kyrgyz traditional music more authentically than he."

Apparently there are also some who are better at hip-hop and Taiko drumming. This is just silly.

I have a whole screed about people who misspell "aficionados."

"It perhaps needs to be said here that Mark Swed is one of the two or three finest newspaper classical music critics in the country - he is much more reliable than anyone at the New York Times, for example."

I think Mark Swed's mother has shown up.

Swed is pompous, and particularly vicious towards musicians or composers that stray out of the little boxes he thinks they should stay in.

cmdicely:

Fair point, I should have kept my remarks confined to the quoted excerpt and not referred to the whole article as such until I had read it first, that was sloppy of me and not something I usually do, hence my acknowledgement of the point. That said, within those constraints I stand by the essence of my original post. This had an exceptionally nasty and pretentious flavour to it that really left me sour. I have enjoyed classical music since early childhood, learned to play (varying degrees from one to six years depending on which instrument) about a half dozen instruments by the time I came of legal age, and have a passing familiarity with Ma and his career and have a reasonable understanding of his strengths and weaknesses as a performer. As others already have noted this has been pointed out about his ability on a pure/technical level versus his ability to perform in such a way as to capture the wider public before by others but this was a particularly offensive way to have put it, at least it came off that way to me.

I make no pretensions about my own ability to judge at an extremely fine level within music, just enough to be able to understand what is under discussion and be able to tell whether the points are fair/valid or not. What this quote was saying was a direct shot to the heart about this and appears to be very mean spirited and a bit on the intellectually pretentious side as well to me. That is of course only my opinion, and I certainly do not think my opinions are all that special, it is just for me this read and felt very toxic and gratuitous in making a point others have already noted with Ma. He is quite proficient if not the absolute best in any form (granting this is true, I am not qualified in my view to speak to that degree) and able to make cross over work more accessible to a wider audience, which in my mind is no small gift/talent as a musician and should not be seen as a basis to take a fairly straight to the heart kind of hit like this. It seemed to me unkind at best and poisonous at worst, and laced with contempt to varying degrees based on which end of the spectrum the author meant it from.

Still though, most times when we discuss topics here that reference another source I go to them, this was simply a topic I felt I could be a bit less direct on. Still though I let my tendency to read whole articles cloud the way I wrote my first comment instead of explicitly confining them to the excerpted quote Drum gave and that was quite wrong of me and I both apologize for it and thank you for pointing it out in a civil and fair manner. I hope I have provided an acceptable revision and apology for my sloppy work and unfairly expanding the excerpt onto the whole article without having read it first. I only hope you will accept that this is not something I generally make a habit of but in this case I freely admit to it. Where I said piece in the first post if you read it as bit and instead of the thrust of the article being as I characterized it simply that this element of the article was as I originally said. That is what I should have said and not gone beyond the confines of those boundaries.

Have you ever listened to gorgeously-voiced opera sopranos trying their hand at popular or Broadway music? It's generally quite forgettable.

Bob

Ma v. Karttunen: Critical cat-fight at the OK corrall. Bad critical writing is just like bad reporting, and just as loaded (can you say, "Democrat Party")

Ma v. Karttunen: Critical cat-fight at the OK corrall. Bad critical writing is just like bad reporting, and just as loaded (can you say, "Democrat Party")

Ma v. Karttunen: Critical cat-fight at the OK corrall. Bad critical writing is just like bad reporting, and just as loaded (can you say, "Democrat Party")

SED - Rostropovich certainly was considered the world's greatest cellist for a long time. He was born in 1927, so he must be 79 years old or so. I wonder whether he's too old to still be the world's greatest.

It's just some know-it-all music critic mouthing off and needing something to write for a column. It means nothing at all, it's just his opinion. Who really cares? If you like to listen to Ma then go ahead; otherwise don't.

It means Mr. Ma is OVERRATED. But since the world (and especially the Pentagon) is full of such people, it just means he is human and occasionally likes to trifle with audiences. More power to him. May his critics get trapped in the Transporter machine on their way back from the 18thC forever.

What you're supposed to take away from this is that Mark Swed is a terribly clever fellow. That's pretty much what you're supposed to take away from most of the LA Times reviews these days. I stopped reading their movie reviews because all I got from most of them was that the reviewer regards Touch of Evil as a masterpiece.

Not the most helpful piece of information when trying to decide if by shelling out ten bucks I'll be entertained for two hours.

I don't know why we need to make an issue of who is or who isn't the world's greatest cellist (or world's greatest anything else, for that matter). If I had to vote, I'd vote for Rostropovich, but that doesn't mean I want to listen only to Rostropovich. Rostropovich is one thing, Ma is another. I like them both. They're both wonderful at what they do. The world is plenty big enough for both of them and their recordings. Never heard of this Finnish character, but if he can make Carter sound like real music, might be worth a listen.

Now, you want a fight, let's talk Pavarotti and whether he should have been taking up as much air space as he did for the last few decades.

Those of us who like the music derived from Bill Monroe but not the cattiness you see in the community like to say "Bluegrass music, we eat our own." There's also a theory that the first use of the term "bluegrass" was in the sentence "That ain't bluegrass."

Mr. Swed seems to have brought the same spirit to classical music. Past a certain level of accomplishment, attempting to rank musicians seems quite pointless.

I would add that if the point of art is to communicate, then Mr. Ma's remarkable ability to engage an audience is undervalued in some quarters.

As Duke Ellington used to say, "If it sounds good it IS good."

Yo Yo Ma is highly polished, yet inventive and playful. He's open to experimenting in a wide range of genres that have musical merit.

I get a lot of pleasure listening to him. I will not let the LAT take that away.

Anssi Karttunen, for one, can more effectively make Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto sound like music than can Ma, although it was written for him.

Isn't this remark rather bizarre in its own right? I mean, what does it say about someone that they can make something "sound like music", which, one gathers, isn't naturally inclined to do so? Why might that be a key differentiator?

Shouldn't we be more attentive to how well people play things that start out sounding like music?

And when is music that doesn't sound like music finally going to die its appointed and long sought for death? Schoenberg kicked it over 50 years ago for Christ's sake! Take your "music" and your whole stinking movement with you!

Uh-oh. Yo-Yo Ma is starting to suffer from Artist Universality Syndrome.

For years no one could say a bad word about him. But he became too popular. Now, if you want to show off how knowledgeable you are, you had better explain in detail exactly why someone obscure is better at playing something obscure.

Classical music is almost as slippery as pop. Terminology, frames of reference, and opinions all differ wildly and criticism at any subjective level is only occasionally useful.

With all that in mind, I have to say that Ma is and always has been one of my very favorite musicians on earth. His technique was unmatched and is now, after a couple more decades, only astonishing. He has a unique, effortless, open, and very beautiful sound (interestingly, it's one I think of as more "American" than that of most cellists. And his phrasing is very effective and shows 1) a lot of heart and 2) the ability to sustain which, almost by itself, distinguishes great musicians from proficient ones.

It doesn't hurt, either, that he is one of the nicest people in classical music. (My best friend used to be a supervisor at the Starbucks in Cambridge, Mass. where he buys his coffee when he's not on the road. I've also heard plenty of anecdotes from others, although I've never had the good fortune to meet him personally.)

SED: Rostrapovich is half dead; Lynn Harrell should be. Think again. And try actually listening to some modern cellists.

Tom, SED: I think Isserls at least shows "promising upside," if not more.

Yo Yo Ma is an immigrant and hates America?

Hmmm, and a blonde asked him to "call me."

Mike points out well that Ma commissioned the piece FROM Carter rather than Carter writing it FOR MA of Carter's own accord.

It should be no big deal then, that Ma, who doesn't do that much 20th C music, or do it well, can't play Carter better than at least one, if not several, other cellists of today.

It's classical music criticism at its best. The critic found somebody -- in this case, Karttunen -- who most of his readership has never heard perform and most of his newspaper's readership doesn't know existed, and used him to punch out a performer who has a lot of talent, a lot of personality, and a history of really good career moves. As "just sayin" said above, bluegrass fans can be like that. The punk rockers in the 1980s were like that. Classicists are the same way but with a different, usually more passive-aggressive, type of vocabulary. I quit hanging out on classical music Internet forums because the people who want to grow up to be just like Mark Swed reached critical mass.

I meant to write "Isserlis" above, sorry.

Kevin, I have heard Ma do both classical music and Central Asian traditional music with his Silk Road Project. Plus, I have several Elliott Carter albums.

I believe the critic was suggesting two things:

1. In the classical world, Ma is a bit too "pop" -- stuff like Beethoven, Brahms, etc., but not that good at modern classical. I would agree.

2. That Ma, while he brings an interest, fervor, and certainly a name to Central Asian music, more often he is performing Tan Dun stuff rather than authentic Central Asian classics from 500 years ago; in other words, again, he's a bit too "pop."

Somebody else called it Artist Universality Syndrome; in acting, it might be called "playing against type."

The problem, though, is, if you play too much against type, and can't do it well, you expose yourself. And, in the rarified air of top cellists, that's what Ma does when he tries to do Elliott Carter.

Only thing I come away with is a wanker of a critic:"look how snobbish I am, yammering about some dreadful piece of "modern classical music" only 5 people in the world want to listen to by some composer no one has heard of and pretending that that is the defining piece of cello music."

Feh. Whatever happened to composers coming up with music that sounds like something? Give me Bach or Monteverdi any day.

Let me explain it another way: USC may be America's most popular college football team. That is not to say that USC is America's finest football team.

The cello only has true musical merit in the background. Who wouldnt rather listen to an evening of good player on virtually any instrument as opposed to the best cello player? The instrument has extrememly limited capabilities.

Wow! This is way beyond my depth.

And waiting for the elections is nerve wracking.

Kevin, how about another post on Roger Federer???

Bela Bartok insightfully commented that musical performance "is not a horse race." Mr. Swed apparently doesn't recognize that wisdom.

Yo Yo Ma would probably scoff at the idea that he is the "World's greatest cellist." The whole thing is a red herring in my opinion.

For what it's worth, I -am- a classical music critic.

And one who carries no torch for Yo-Yo Ma. I've always disliked his playing, even before he was famous. (You want a great current cellist, try Gary Hoffman.)

But I have to agree with the posters above. What you are supposed to take away from this is that Swed is a pretentious git. Even the snide remark about did the difficulty of making Elliott Carter "sound like music," which is the kind of thing I'd say, is out of place here.

Swed is laying down boilerplate to establish his credentials as a snob before admitting, as he does in the rest of his review, that he actually enjoyed the concert.

I hope that I never write my reviews that way.

m.croche: "It perhaps needs to be said here that Mark Swed is one of the two or three finest newspaper classical music critics in the country - he is much more reliable than anyone at the New York Times, for example."

chuck: I think Mark Swed's mother has shown up.

Grow up, Chuck. I don't even know the guy. Music criticism is a difficult profession: getting paid to spout off your opinions with comparatively little push-back can be quite intellectually corrosive. The only decent ones writing regularly are Tim Page and Mark Swed. David Schiff is also reliable when he publishes. As far as personality is concerned, Swed always struck me as mild-mannered and respectful - folks who think Swed is pompous and arrogant should get a load of Anthony Tommasini.

For what it's worth, Karttunen's a wonderful performer and can be seen performing Tan Dun's interesting "The Map" on DVD.

Ma's a fantastic player, his musical curiosity is terrific and his performances are laudible. I'm not sure whether he's quite as nice as people here make him out to be - but artistic excellence isn't a popularity contest.

Swed's attempt at complex back-handed disdain couched as a qualified, sniffing compliment failed, catching him in the face on the return, just as a badly-handled bullwhip wraps itself around the unfortunate novice's own head.

Some classical critics bore themselves into a written voice suited to whiny Victorian drawing-room inhabitant whose major life complaint is that his tea is a shade too warm or a shade too cold.

Swed is an awful critic. There are critics who critique Kyrgyz and bluegrass better, for the simply reason that Swed critiques nothing well.

Personally, I'm all for Hanslick.

Another classical music critic here. Everyone's more or less nailed it above. Ma is a virtuoso with an omnivorous ear who likes to dabble in all sorts of things. The positive spin is that he revels in all sorts of music (and can pick up all manner of styles incredibly well -- the guy has a remarkable ear). The downside is that an awful lot of what Ma does is done as well or better by other people who don't have enormous long-term contracts with Sony.

I got some grief for saying so about his forays into Baroque cello (in an article for the Sunday NYT a few years ago). Basically, rather than play existing Baroque music for the cello (like the Bach Suites, which of course he's recorded, or the Vivaldi concertos and sonatas, which he hasn't), he had Ton Koopman make a bunch of arrangements of chorale settings from the Bach cantatas. Think your basic "Relaxing Baroque" arrangement collection, with period instruments and a picture of Yo-Yo Ma on the cover. (Actually, that was half the album, the other half being two Boccherini concertos that actually were for the instrument.) The title was "Simply Baroque" (urgh!). To be followed by "Simply Baroque 2," exactly the same format.

The trouble with this is that there are actually people who live with Baroque cello, take seriously what makes the instrument different and what makes the music different when played on it, &c. The same people are generally interested also in what Bach was doing when he set chorales (hint: They weren't just pretty tunes; they had words). And so forth. Ma was just checking out this whole scene, fiddling around with a spare cello and a Baroque bow, dabbling. No harm in that, but it was also kind of flippant: "Oh, yeah, Baroque cello, I've done that." Now if he'd tried the Bach Suites on it, that would've been something else . . .

Kevin: "What am I supposed to take away from this?"

A deep sense of cultural inferiority, or a headache -- your choice.

Kevin: "What am I supposed to take away from this?"
A deep sense of cultural inferiority, or a headache -- your choice.
Posted by: Donald from Hawaii on October 31, 2006 at 1:03 AM | PERMALINK

As a sports and pop hater, I feel your pain.

Swed has been with the LA Times for well over a decade. He's always been this way. I'm not sure I ever read a completely positive review from him during the entire time I lived in LA. That said, I've been to a number of performances he's reviewed, and I think I have a pretty good idea of his approach. Yes, he's from the insufferable snob school of music criticism. I guess every paper with big pretensions has to have such a critic. But if you filter out a bit of the snobbery, he's knowledgeable with an experienced, good and predictable ear. That's all I can ask for, really, in a critic.

And in this case, I happen to agree with him. Ma is a force of nature, and in my opinion is the worlds most important cellist. But the best? Certainly not with any uniformity. For example, I've heard Janos Starker do the Bach Cello Suites in concert, and don't think Ma holds a candle to him (at least not compared to Starker twenty years ago, when I heard him). And I can believe the comment about Carter -- that's just not where Ma's strengths are. Carter is a cantankerous SOB genius of the first order who writes nearly impenetrable music, and no doubt paid little attention to Ma's particular talents.

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In a land and time far, far away, I was a professional musician. I didn't play cello. I played trumpet. While I primarily played jazz, I also played in quite a number of classical ensembles. Playing multiple styles is incredibly difficult. Playing any style at the level Yo Yo Ma does is almost impossible. Playing multiple styles at that level is astonishing.

Music critiques of this sort annoy me to the point that my teeth hurt. Suggesting that a brilliant musician performs a particular piece better than another brilliant musician is utterly stupid.

These critics just don't get it. What Ma and a few others do is impossible to almost everyone in the world. They perform extraordinary physical feats while making them sound beautiful and easy. Ma played what he played beautifully, I'm sure. And that's all that counts.

It shows that Mark Swed is a complete amateur compared to the critics of the past. I refer to one of my favorite little books about music, Nicolas Slonimsky's "Lexicon of Musical Invective". The index lists "chamber of horrors symphony", "polycacophony" "demons struggling in a torrent of brandy", and "sticky frog-like sexuality" among it's many critical terms. Swed's "makes [it] sound like music" is decidedly tame and uninventive.

jjb2

I don't think Swed is about the vitriol. But I agree, the Slonimsky book is a real hoot.

Anyone here remember Martin Bernheimer? Believe me, Swed is a step up for the LA Times. They're both snobs, but Swed is neither as stuffy nor as limited in his tastes.

The reviewer does not like Yo Yo Ma.

Who cares? Reviewers live in a rarified world, and their tastes are elevated.

Did that Finnish guy get a Chuck Berry-style rave-up written about him by the sweetest, smartest, funniest guys in Nashville?

No?

Hate that for him.

jjb2:

"sticky frog-like sexuality" ... Help! I'm going to be haunted by that image for the next month ...

After reading this wonderful thread (and drinking a first cuppa joe), I have a tad bit more to say here.

I think waterfowl made some key points. There is a conflict between the high, pure-art ideals of classical music and the imperatives of music labels. Classical-only labels generally don't need to produce superstars (because they don't pay superstar royalties), but major labels run their classical divisions as loss leaders. Since the majors can attract the most sought-after classical musicians (with both lucrative contracts and wide distribution), they need a rafter of superstars to essentially pay the bills for the rest of the label. Sort of like the way Michael Jackson in his heyday used to subsidize the rest of the catalogue (while driving out bin space for it in music stores). So there's intense pressure to find and promote the next Yo Yo Ma (who really is a tremendously nice guy with a wide ear and a huge love of all kinds of music), Paravotti, Cecile Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, (Russian pianist, I forget his first name) Kissin -- and market them like the classical equivalent of pop superstars.

Since when you get to that rarefied level of performance where only passive-aggressively snobbish music critics try to draw distinctions (Bartok's right), the labels know you need more than a resume of bravaura. It helpes if you're, you know, physically attractive (and Sophie-Mutter is quite the babe). Or have some interesting things about your personality for the writeups. And then there's all kinds of pressure on you from the label to do crossover albums (to justify, you know, last year's big contract).

The problem is that there are more dillettantes out there in radioland who listen to classical music as a kind of aural tranquilizer than there are serious classical fans. And catching the ear of these folks is what makes or breaks "blockbuster" classical releases. So you get ... wall-to-wall Pachelbel's Canon for an unmemorable season in the 80s. The Greatest Hits of 1720. Or dragging the affable Ma into a studio, handing him a period instrument and sweet-talking him into doing some *arrangements* of Bach choral music. Arrangements? When there are the unmatched Bach solo cello sonatas (which every progrock bass guitarist worth their weight in odd time signatures used to practice with in the 70s)?

This is *inevitably* going to offend purists, for both good and bad reasons. Bad, because snobbery resists the "impure" by reflex. But good because it 1) drives away attention from the early-music specialists and 2) produces an album of "light Baroque" as satisfying to true Bach fans as Toscanini's symphonic arrangement of the Fugue in D Minor. It boosts Ma's broader reputation (and superstar status) while creating a degree of lingering resentment.

It's important to understand this isn't Ma's fault. He has a genuine feel for the music in which he "dabbles." I've heard him play Appalachian traditional music and was moved nearly to tears. If his superstardom and attention to music other than classical can serve to inspire young cellists, then it's all to the good. But it's also fair to say that Ma, like all musicians no matter how great, has his strengths and weaknesses. The modern repetoire isn't one of them.

This puts the reviewer in an unenviable position. I think his intent was to give a shout-out to that Finnish guy who has a stronger affinity for Carter's piece. And also to the players who do more than dabble in Central Asian music. But this is inevitably going to come across as a "dis" to a legendary and beloved figure. I'm not so sure that all the snark directed at this critic for this is entirely well-placed. I see it as part of what happens when you turn classical players -- even though it ain't baseball, they do submit to their own form of objective standards -- when the music industry does all it can to reify them into "legendary figures" beyond the reach of all criticism.

Bob

I'm sure later in the piece, Swed admits that he likes Yo Yo, "but only the early stuff." Typical dilletante critic's disdain for "pop" music. Cash his chips.

The person who said that the cello should be relegated to the background has no soul.

The cello is one of the warmest, most humanly expressive instruments there is ...

Well-played solo cello is drop-dead gorgeous in a way that makes the violin seem obnoxious by comparison.

Bob

FYI, the WAPO reports today that LAT subscriptions are down 8 percent, largest of the major American dailies.

Bill Kalish:

I think you meant to accuse Swed of being a snob, not a dilletante.

Dilletantes have little trouble with "dabbling" in pop or anything else.

Snobs are the purists who insist on nothing less than perfection as the composer would see it.

Bob

DUH...oh, maybe that a week before such a critical election there are more important issues to discuss than WHO is the world's finest cellist! MY GOD...

mark swed is a tool who for some reason dislikes Mr Ma. At least that's what I get from that graf.

As I'm sure we all know by now, Ma is a fine cellist, and that there are other fine cellists as well. The problem is that the media only has time for/interest in ONE cellist and Yo-yo is the one who has gotten the nod.

This is partly because he is a superbly accomplished musician, but more because he's better looking than the superbly accomplished Lynn Harrell and younger than the superbly accomplished Rostropovich, and above all, because he has a superlatively accomplished marketing team.

It's no different with jazz. Who's the greatest living jazz trumpet player? Anyone who is knowledgeable about jazz and has a genuinine love for the music will have an opinion, and in most cases it will NOT be Wynton Marsalis.

Yet to everyone else, to those who don't follow the music, there is only one jazz trumpet player and it's always you know who. Why? Because one is all we have time for. But why precisely Wynton? Because he's the most marketable.

This reminds me of hearing Perleman on NPR a few years back. He and Marc O'Connor were playing some bluegrass. He even talked about how much he wanted Yo Yo Ma to join them for an album, but he spoke about how difficult it was to arrange this with their various agents, recording contracts and schedules.

At some point, an e-mail was read blasting Perleman for daring to call himself a fiddler.

His response was "Do you know, sir, the difference between a fiddler and a violinist? About fifty dollars".

Michael Ryle:

Bingo.

TheThirdPaul:

Droll :)

Bob

On, Dancer.....Oh sorry, should 'a typed:

No, Dancer! I am a political junky like few others, but I swear I have had enough.

Enough polls
Enough adds
Enough stories about adds
(Enough stories about polls)

Makes me long for a missing white girl or a media star who murders.

Keep these posts coming, Kevin. Puleese!!

Yikes...

adds = ads

Bob, have any coffee left?

*pouring Keith a cup of Cafe Oquendo.*

You take half-and-half?

Bob

love it

I think the asshole author is calling him out. You know: Yo Yo Ma... 'Yo MaMa.

Ma has used his popularity and relative celebrity to bring all kinds of cello & other string music, including various folk traditions as well as european classical, to audiences that would never listen to them otherwise. Wouldn't want that.

Now an interesting topic in classical music might be the rise of sexed up cover pictures of female performers to sell classical.

Pedantic critics of the "purist" sort.

How often was Miles Davis criticized for experimenting with different styles?

Oh, and Dylan, ooooooh the sky is falling, went acoustical.

How often has the "He or she sold out" been heard?

Kevin,
What you _should_ take away from this lede paragraph and the rest of the review is that the reviewer likes to strike an amiable but ultimately condescending pose. The essay reminds me of something I heard years ago:
"Those who can, do.
Those who can, but maybe not so well, teach. Those who who would like to think that they could, if they didn't have so many other important things to accomplish, write reviews of those who can."

Well, my takeaway is that the LAT isn't employing competent line or copy editors: it should be either "more authentically than him" or "more authentically than he *does*."

Posted by: The Confidence Man on October 30, 2006 at 7:23 PM | PERM

"more authentically than he" is the correct form. The "does" is understood. Using "him" would require that the word "him" be an object of something, which it is not; it is only the subject of the (understood) clause "he does." Thus, the sujbective form is correct, and the objective form "him" is not.

Gahh ... all this dumping on music critics. As I said (in many more words) above, I think Swed is getting brickbats for having the temerity to over even the faintest criticism of a superstar. If you'll read the whole review, it was quite positive.

And the reason for this is mainly because superstars -- super as indeed they are -- tend to drive away attention from other artists working in those fields. Though I never heard the Ma piece he commissioned from the exceedingly challenging Elliott Carter -- I can well imagine that his sort of cello playing wouldn't do it the justice it deserved, from what else I've heard of Ma's playing. I think it's not only a fair criticism of Ma -- but more importantly it serves to boost the name recognition of that Finnish guy (heh, good job, too, as you can tell :) who's more proficient at that kind of extremely specialized music.

TheThirdPaul:

Well, I'll have to quibble with you about Miles. Up until around In A Silent Way, when when he began getting his band into electric instruments, Miles was known as somewhat of a Wynton Marsalis-like reactionary. In the early-mid 60s he not only had an open contempt for Ornette Coleman (which, granted, was fairly easy to do as Coleman's "harmolodics" seemed like anarchy to all but a tiny handful of fans and critics) -- but he was also known for crapping all over the classically-trained and harmonically sophisticated Eric Dolphy.

To dis Eric Dolphy is an unforgivable sin in my book, no matter who's doing the dissing.

By the time Miles hit his jazz-rock phase and married that funk singer (forget her name), he was pretty heavily into drugs, and was specifically looking to cop the fan mojo of the exploding rock scene. So, even though it led to an incredibly fertile and influential period for Miles (and launched more careers than it's easy to name) -- you do have to wonder a little bit about where the motivation came from ... Miles was so whacked-out throughout the 70s that he succeeded to a large extent in spite of himself.

Bob

The reviewer's comment isn't especially brilliant, but it's also not as devoid of meaning as you seem to believe. There are two parts:

1) Re: Elliot Carter. Complicated new music is seen as an acid test for one kind of musical intelligence. Carter's music is especially in with a certain sort of academic new-music crowd in this regard. So the fact that someone outplays Ma in the Carter concerto is seen as relevant -- especially since this concerto was written for Ma. (Counterarguments: (a) Even classical musicians in the know don't necessarily give a darn about Carter's music; and (b) as you said, the music of one relatively minor composer is a ludicrous yardstick for measuring Ma's ability.)

2) Re: Folk & World Music. Ma has very purposefully set himself up as a world-music player, with his Silk Road and Appalachian albums. So the reviewer is simply pointing out that other players may do these things better.

Of course, one might say that a cellist's reputation would depend more on the standards: Dvorak, Haydn, Schumann and Elgar concertos, and Brahms and Beethoven sonatas. And 20th century works count too -- but it's the Shostakovich that matters, not the Carter. (And let's not forget chamber music -- Ma has participated in very good quartet and quintet concerts and recordings.) Plus you might think that versatility counts for something -- you ought not to be counted down for your willingness to go outside the box (e.g., Silk Road project) even if you're not the top player there.

"As 'just sayin' said above, bluegrass fans can be like that. The punk rockers in the 1980s were like that. Classicists are the same way but with a different, usually more passive-aggressive, type of vocabulary."

The problem is not in fans of particular styles, the problem is the curious American habit of turning everything into a spectator sport, coupled with our intense love and respect for our own opinions. This was sent up most entertainingly in the book/movie "High Fidelity," with the geeky record store staff making lists of five best or ten best whatever.

I'm not a classical critic, but I'm a classical musician, and one thing I've noticed over the years is that most professional performers, no matter what genre, have a 180-degree opposite persective. Musicians hear how well you feel the music, how well you perform in the appropriate style. Sure, you have to play the right notes, but that's just where it starts. Classical musicians (not necessarily critics or listeners) have a healthy appreciation for jazz, rock, bluegrass, country, etc. musicians and vice versa. This notion of "who's the best?" is at best a distraction and at worst a perversion.

Professional critics are usually from the class of people who don't believe the "de gustibus" line to be irrevocably true and that if they just pile up arcane stuff that it won't be, that surely Life will make an exception for someone like them.

rcmk1,

Bob, why you pedantic..............

er, no, points well taken.

wally:

Excellent comments. Thank you.

People are freaking out at Sned like Yo Yo Ma is Babe Ruth or something. I don't see Sned's remarks as criticisms of Ma at all, but rather as attempts to *humanize* him. No musician is so extraordinary that he can go in there and play every single style of music with the same authentic conviction. Different skill sets are involved. And plus, there's the ever-present pressure from the label to cut a "blockbuster" crossover hit -- so I see the idea of tempering Ma's world music enthusiasm with a note that there are others who deserve recognition as well to be a healthy thing. I saw the remark about Carter's piece as a boost to the career of that Finnish cellist, not a dis to Ma.

As the previous commenter noted, none of this challenges or even comments on his mastery of the standard virtuoso cello repetoire.

Bob

So the reviewer is simply pointing out that other players may do these things better.

I've never understood what "better" means in Art. It's a big world, and Art is a particularly amorphous critter. Even Shakespeare dealt with a finite range of human possibility and feeling. Is there a Shakespeare line intenser than Webster's "Mine eyes dazzle. She died young?" Yet, Webster revivals are few. If Yo Yo Ma plays bluegrass, the suspicion is that he simply enjoys playing bluegrass. Wallace Stevens said that few critics understand that one doesn't write to be part of this or that movement, that for the poet its possible to have a feeling about the world that nothing satisfies except poetry. Marsha Ball, Sam Bush, Yo Yo Ma, Lester Young, Ry Cooder ... they aren't in competition.

Boy, this thread has taken off since last night.

Some good points made above: hat tip to rmck1, waterfowl and DB.

(It's amazing how civilized we can be when not talking politics!)

I'm no musician...I play the stereo extremely well and that's about it. My sister, however, is a sometime professional cellist.
So, I'm going to echo what she says: Ma is not the "best" at most of his repertoire. He is, however, quite good.
It's a bit of a shame that he's by far the world's most famous cellist...but that's the nature of classical marketing today.

The good news is that that least his fame is not an absolute travesty like Bocelli for vocal works...(now when they find a handsome blind cellist who can't play worth a lick, then the game really will be over).

Click the link. Always click the link.

Have no problem at all with Perleman, Yo Yo Ma and Marc O'Connor doing bluegrass.

However, I do believe the Ishtak and Yo Yo meet Snoop Dog was a bit of a push.

I have to wonder, is making Elliot Carter sound more like music really the point?

"Can somebody knowledgable help me out here? What am I supposed to take away from this"

No-one is more annoying than the superior music snob.

Spellcheck

Itzhak Perlman and Marc O'Connor.

And Yo Yo Ma does have Marc as his lead performer on "Double Yo-Yo", an album featuring Bach.

Mr. Ma has used his celebrity to make all kinds of music not necessarily in the classics repertoire. He is so universally beloved that the Ellsworth Toohey's of the LA Times' humanities section must find some criticism to throw at him.

Mr. Ma is probably not the best cellist in the world for every cello piece ever wriitten. Celebrity just makes him seem that he is.

That the real yo-yo is reviewer Mark Swed?

How could he not be famous, with the name Yo Yo Ma?

Maybe music posts should be left to music blogs. That's my takeaway. ;-)

Somebody suggested he could have a great crossover rap career if he just altered his name the tiniest touch to Yo Ma Ma :)

Bob

TheThirdPaul:

Hey man, the Yehudi Menuin and Ravi Shankar album kicked serious ass :) Seriously, it did.

Not to mention Elvin Jones with Oregon ... still a favorite.

I'm a progrocker. I grew up with eclecticism and cross-fertilization of disparate styles ...

Bob

BStu:

Now if somebody could come along and make Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band sound like music -- that would be a real trick, wouldn't it :)

"That's right, The Mascara Snake -- Fast 'n' Bulbous!"

I seriously adore Don Van Vliet.

Bob

Bob: Have you ever listened to gorgeously-voiced opera sopranos trying their hand at popular or Broadway music? It's generally quite forgettable.

Would that it were. I've been trying for years to forget "Kiri on Broadway" doing Cole Porter.

This probably has to do with the fact that Karttunen is Finnish as is the outgoing Director of the L.A. Philharmonic, Essa Pekka. This must be Swed's kneepad vale to him. Perhaps you remember how much Finnish music used to be played on KUSC before Salonen's arrival and how much is played now.

I love music, but don't play and lack technical knowledge. Blindfolded, I couldn't tell Yo Yo Ma from Rostropovich or Harrell or Starker. So I'm asking out of pure ignorance and because I want to know: how much better are any of these guys than, say, the first chair cellist at any of a dozen major orchestras? Why should I pay major label prices when I can get works performed by unknowns on Naxos? Is it the musical equivalent of winner-takes-all economics? Is the musical ecosystem only big enough for a couple of name cellists and others not noticeably inferior get crowded out as a result? What's going on here?

Reviewer is laying out his musical cred. He's smarter than anyone reading the review.

WTF? He's a BFD. Yippee

I'm interrupting my cello practice to read these comments.

YYM has broadened the traditional European music audience, and that is a good thing. While he might not critically be the best cellist out there, I think people like him because he appears so poised, balanced, and, well, happy to perform for them. On the other hand, some musicians complain that he gets an awful lot of money for his performances. And, Performance Today recently played an excerpt where he fell of the stage during one of them.

HE's commendably used his popularity to introduce his audience to terrific music outside the American mainstream--I love the tango album, not so much the brazil, and I haven't heard the silk road yet. In that way, he's sort of like Ry Cooder, who's also a very cool guy for getting outside the mainstream.

When YYM joined Mark O'Connor on violin and Edgar Meyer on double bass for Appalachian Journey, we hear the beginnings of a unique collaboration which has broadened to include other musicians, too. You hear improvisations on Appalachian tunes, many of which they write themselves. The first disc introduced one piece to the scant solo cello repertoire, Appalachian Waltz, which is a bugger to play. The performer in this crowd who is a must-hear, live, is Edgar Meyer. NOone else can make the sounds he can, and you feel them deep down in your guts.

I must return to my practice. I will never play like any of these guys, but I like being in the club.

Bruce

Um, the critic is implying that versatility is important, and that Yo-Yo Ma is not versatile. He is also implying that perhaps listeners have been deafened by the Yo-Yo Ma Hype Machine. He's probably right.

I seriously adore Don Van Vliet

Bongo fury take a ride in my terraplane and eat some candy corn. Be reborn.

Kevin,

Yo-Yo Ma is the equivalent of a 'pop star' in classical music. He's good, no question...but his popularity is due more to canny marketing than merit. He is the first cellist, and one of the first world-class concert string players, to emerge from China...this made him novel when he first arrived on the scene. He has a very charming, gentle personality. He managed to parlay the two into a public image as a benign, supremely talented cultural ambassador. He made himself famous to my generation by appearing on shows like Sesame Street. At that age, we accepted him as a master not because we were able to make the assessment ourselves.

I personally believe he's overrated. His Bach sounds like Puccini. But how can you stay mad at a guy like that?

Sincerely,

theperegrine

theperegrine:

That earns yet another Bingo :)

Bob

CJColluci:

That's a really damn good question. Let's start with the wisdom of our dear departed Uncle Frank: "If it sounds good to YOU, it's BITCHEN. If it doesn't, it SUCKS."

There's the alpha and omega of it. Hard to say more.

You're right about the self-justifying nature of the economics. It's not a free market where the best performances win, because few people have the time or the web savvy to comparison shop. So the "big names" and glitzy packaging serve as a shorthand, and when people you know buy a certain release, play it for you and you like it, then you have to go and get it, too. And they're ususally the popular releases.

And because the "big names" are excellent enough musicians to turn in at least really good performances on pretty much everything they play -- unless you've heard other versions you like better, you deal with that version as how you know the piece.

But in the classical tradition, there are often really large variations in interpretation. You may really like some fresh Juilliard prodigy's interpretation of the Goldberg Variations and hate the mega-famous Glenn Gould's. But you'd never know unless you hear it.

Variations in symphonic music are especially sensitive to taste preference. Each major orchestra has its own sound. Some have gorgeous string sections. Some have really crisp, tight horns. Some conductors hew very much to time-honored performance standards. Some go as far as rearranging Beethoven to fit their particular orchestras. Bernstein's version of The Planets with the NY Philharmonic is different than all others I've ever heard because he takes the tempos so damn fast. Seji Osawa's version of the Rite of Spring is mud; Pierre Boulez's is on the money. With orchestral music, it's probably best to go with a "name," because of the logistics involved with getting (close to) perfection out of big orchestras. Recording quality matters.

With chamber ensembles or solo artists, it's much more variable. There are often wonderful versions of pieces on bargain labels. I still prefer my Walter Klein LP on Angel of the big three Beethoven piano sonatas to the one on Columbia Masterworks (I can't even remember the name of the pianist), and that, even though he blows a tonic note in the finale arpeggios of movement 3 of the Apassionata. A fucking Db! Couldn't he have dubbed that out? But I adore the damn brio of that record.

One of the most important records to me in my late adolecence is also on Angel. Michael Tilson Thomas and Ralph Grierson doing the composer's two-piano reduction of The Rite of Spring. It's a minor work, of course; strictly for Stravinsky freaks. But you can hear so many more of the composer's ideas with all that polytonal parallel-motion clash peeled away that it was a goddamned revelation. My buddy and I used to practice the first part of Dance of the Adolescents in our highschool rock band after he got the score ...

Bob

Bob (rmck1),

Absolutely, the major-label-driven nature of classical-music "fame" has everything to do with it. Yo-Yo Ma is by far the most famous cellist mainly because he and Sony are an absolutely perfect match. Sony adores crossover projects, and Ma genuinely enjoys forays into anything and everything, so basically he can experiment to his heart's content and Sony will issue an album or two of the results. It's ideal.

No other cellist is in remotely the same position. I mean, who else even has a major-label contract at all? Let's see: Lynn Harrell and Han-Na Chang are with EMI, but Harrell has been sticking to chamber music with them (and not much of that), and Chang doing a disc or year or less. (Oh, and Truls Mork is with Virgin.) Steven Isserlis is with BMG — again, doing only chamber music AFAIK recently. Anyone at all at the Universal labels? Well, Philips had that Russian model/cellist Nina Kotova -- don't know what happened to her. There's no one else.

Not that there aren't plenty of other fine cellists; they just don't record for the majors. Matt Haimovitz, David Finckel [OK, he records for DG, but only as part of the Emerson Qt.], Daniel Müller-Schott, Pieter Wispelwey . . . not to mention all the exclusively-"period" folks. The point is that unless you follow classical music at all closely, Yo-Yo Ma is the only currently-performing cellist you're likely to have heard of, because no one else has recorded a tenth as much.

I second the comment of whoever said Lynn Harrell's looks do him no favors in the major-label marketing department. I think major labels divide all classical musicians into babes and non-babes (of both sexes), and design cover art accordingly. Non-babes still make it onto covers, but much less often. In the cases of Alfred Brendel and Murray Perahia, I suspect a contractual mandate ;-)

What can be sillier than to say of a classical musician, "oh, he's just marketing," or "he has really sold out." Imagine you've been practicing your instrument for years and you finally win a competition and get a few recitals. Somebody comes up to you and says, "We manage X and Y, and we'd like to manage you, and we'll get you 30 concerts and two records every year." What are you supposed to say? "Oh no, I have to be pure to my art." Or after two years with your management, they say, The Boston Symphony wants somebody to do the Dvorak next season. What do you say, "No, I'm just so BORED with the Dvorak. It just doesn't SPEAK to me any more."

Those dedications at the top of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies - do you think he put them there because he was such a nice guy and he really liked his friends? No, it's because they gave him money.

Now, some people do choose to starve in obscurity. And some do sell out - see Pavarotti. But we all have our price.

wally:

It's not "just" marketing in the classical world (the way Britney Spears or Menudo were virtually *all* marketing and little else); you can't compare the two realms at all. It's not like being some raunchy garage-rock band who scores a hit on college radio or indie distribution and a major label comes along with a big advance provided they clean up their act a little. "Selling out" has meaning when it's a choice between struggling in obscurity and fame with strings. Sometimes it's better to struggle a little on your own terms and achieve fame later -- if your point is to be yourself.

But in the classical world it's more about building a career step-by-step, and I agree with everything you say about the normal practice of singing for one's supper as far as choices in the standard repetoire goes. A classical musician isn't your typical rebel-figure anyway; s/he is submitting to a tradition from the word go.

"Selling out" in the classical world only really applies to a tiny minority of "superstars" (and even that's mostly a misnomer) who are vigorously marketed and submit to things like glamourous packaging. It really applies more when their label pressures them to do crossover works which occasionally prove embarrasing, like "Kiri on Broadway" or Paravotti singing ... lords know what with lords know whom. Bono! :)

It's more that classical fans take it as a betrayal if it comes off the slightest bit hokey. I think to this extent, Ma has ably avoided that trap by choosing genuinely obscure (while thoroughly tonal and "inside") forms of music to cross over with.

Bob

> the Russian model/cellist Nina Kotova

I guess it's better than a Russian porn star/cellist ...

Sorry -- couldn't help myself.

I get so much Russian porn spam I had to have a little revenge :)

Bob

I think these kind of comments about Ma trace back at least to his first recording of the Bach Suites (in the 80's?). Cellists tend to look upon the Suites as the touchstone for their instrument, and some were disappointed in this recording, or at least didn't consider it among the best ever (although I love it). All the cellists I've talked to about this love Ma's playing and respect him enormously, but they never seem to have a passion for him the way they might about some other greats mentioned above. I believe that his failure, at least in many ears, to have recorded a landmard Bach Suites has kept him from aquiring the god-like status of a few others. I'm an orchestral bassist, so that's the sense I get from my cello co-workers.

It's interesting that some pieces don't really have a landmark recording and others do. Nobody can sing the Strauss Four Last Songs without inviting comparisons to Schwartzkopf, but when you sing Susanna or Donna Elvira, there is no single exemplar to measure against. With the Bach suites, Yo Yo Ma is unfortunately up against Rostropovich and Starker, and the bar is set very, very high. But, again, this is not a spectator sport. I can name several very successful classical musicians who play to the peanut gallery - "Now listen to I how I play this part!" - and Yo Yo Ma isn't one of them. And nobody can say that he made the Appalachian or Silk Road recordings just to make a buck, as you could say about Kiri Te Kanawa singing jazz standards, or Pavarotti singing in Las Vegas.

Well said, Wally (employ best Eddie Haskell voice here).

I didn´t see the rest of the piece, and maybe Swed was setting up a prolonged snark, but as a music reviewer myself I would guess that he was throwing out qualifiers as a prelude to concluding that Ma´s popularity is due to his unusual -- and unusually well considered -- eclecticism.

Did anyone read the rest?

It means that Yo-Yo Ma is the Sting of classical music.

Kenji:

I think the most egregious thing Swed said in that piece was his swipe at Elliott Carter. "Make it sound more like music." This is just something that Bernard Holland in the NYT would never say, and it makes me question Swed's judgement a little.

It is the biggest cliche in the classical world that the Patrons (the wealthy donors and concert subscribers without whom the modern symphony orchestra couldn't exist) detest postwar music. And yes, it's probably true that dodecaphony and serialism will prove in some future age to have been a blind alley. But not all these works are the same, either, and some have stood the test of time. Berg's Lulu remains a popular and respected opera. John Cage is revered. And say what you will about Carter's "listenability," he's highly respected by his peers and influenced them with his rhythmic innovations.

It's the sort of remark you'd expect over expensive wine at the tony restrauant after the concert. You'd expect a sensitive music critic, who after all is supposed to be more familiar with classical music than the average fan (that's why we read them), to serve as an intelligent guide. We'd expect criticisms of Carter for extreme dissonance or aperiodicity -- something cogent that tells us about the music (and something about the critic's facility). But a blanket dis is redolent of only snobbery. It's bad cuz he doesn't like it.

Besides which, "that's not music" has been a rallying cry for hepcats ever since Louis Armstrong said of bebop "That's not jazz, that's Chinese music!" It's what I heard about ELP's squealing synthesizers when I brought it to an eighth-grade party, and King Crimson's atonal metal at a 10th grade party. And Captain Beefheart a year later. "What are you, nuts? That's not even *music*."

So congratulations, Mr. Swed. All you've done is instilled a desire in me to check out Elliott Carter :)

Bob

Can somebody knowledgable help me out here? What am I supposed to take away from this?

That being the best in the world is not the same as being best at everything.

IOW, YYM may be the best cellist out there, but others can do certain things better.