Cellist

Yo-Yo Ma is a world-famous cellist whose performances draw sell-out crowds. Since his early childhood, Ma had an affinity for the cello that earned him prodigy status, and he matured into the talented interpreter of solo and ensemble works for cello. He has appeared with major orchestras throughout the world and recorded most of the solo cello repertoire. Ma's popularity rests not only on his technical mastery of the cello and superb musicianship, but his ability to communicate to the audience his love of the music he performs.

Born into an upper-class Chinese family living in Paris, Yo-Yo was the youngest of two musically talented children. Ma's affinity for music came as no surprise as his mother, Marina, was a mezzo-soprano and his father, Hiao-Tsiun, was a violinist, composer, and musicologist who specialized in the education of gifted children. The Ma children were schooled at home in the traditional Chinese fashion, with lessons in the Chinese language, literature, and calligraphy. Ma's first musical training was on the violin, but because his sister Yeou-Cheng also played that instrument, Ma wanted to in his words "play something bigger." Ma began to study the cello at age four with his father, who, when he could not find a small enough cello, gave his son a viola to which he had attached an end pin. Ma's father taught using a method that involved practicing for only a half hour each day and memorizing several bars of a Bach suite for unaccompanied cello. In this way, the young cellist learned three such suites by the time he was five years old and performed one of them at his first public recital at the Institute of Art and Archeology at the University of Paris. Despite his astounding ability, Ma was not pressured by his parents to go on tour as a child prodigy.

When Ma was seven years old his family moved to New York City, where his father taught at a school for musically gifted children, including the children of the virtuoso violinist Isaac Stern. One day Stern heard the young Ma play and recommended that he study with Leonard Rose at the Julliard School of Music. Ma auditioned for Rose and as a student in the college prepatory division became the youngest pupil ever of the distinguished cellist. Ma credits Rose with much of his success for, as he told Stephen Wigler of the Baltimore Sun, Rose taught him "everything I know about the cello." Remembering those lessons, Ma told Thor Eckert, Jr., a Christian Science Monitor reporter, "It was quite intense, and from the start Rose taught me that to play the cello you must have an absolute physical relationship with your instrument. When you play you must feel as though the instrument is a part of your body, the strings are your voice, and the cello is your lungs." For his part, Rose described the student's technical and interpretative ability: "He was very small and already quite extraordinary.... When he was about seventeen, he gave a performance of Schubert's Arpeggione, which is a holy terror for cellists, and it was so gorgeous I was moved to tears," he told a writer for Time.

As a teenager, Ma attended New York City's Professional Children's School. He skipped two grades and graduated at age fifteen. That same year he made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall and was asked by the famous conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein to perform on national television for a fund-raising event for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Ma then entered Julliard's college division for a year and the following summer attended the Meadowmount music camp, where, freed from the discipline of his home, he rebelled with irresponsible behavoir. At the end of the summer, his rebellion against the narrowly defined focus of conservatory courses continued in his decision to attend Columbia University instead. Yet after a semester, Ma was also dissatisfied with the academic life at Columbia, and in 1972 he transferred to Harvard University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in humanities in 1976. While at Harvard, Ma took courses in music history, theory, and appreciation and he played in student ensembles. He also began his professional music career by performing on weekends at local venues.

Ma began his full-time performance career in 1976 and in 1978 it was launched when Ma won the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize. The purpose of this award is to give talented young instrumentalists opportunities to perform with major orchestras, and Ma benefitted directly through performances with the New York Philharmonic and other ensembles. After being forced into a one-year hiatus from performing because of surgery to correct an unnaturally curved spine, Ma resumed a busy schedule of appearances that range to 125 per year.

When Ma plays the cello, the tone he produces is not as powerful as those of other famous cellists, but it is silky and he is undoubtedly a master of technique and expressivity. Ma performs and has recorded works from many eras and styles, ranging from Bach concerti to the Britten Symphony for Cello. Since he likes to learn several new pieces each year, early in his career Ma nearly exhausted the somewhat limited repertoire of works for solo cello and began to commission new works from such composers as Leon Kirchner, one of his teachers at Harvard, and Oliver Knussen. Not only does Ma perform as a soloist, but since he is committed to chamber music, he appears and records with his own piano trio, string quartet, and string trio.

—Jeanne M. Lesinski