By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post 4/6/06

Is any performance as intimate as the solo recital? There’s nothing between the artist and audience -- no cloaking orchestra, no partner to play off, no accompanist to pick up the slack. Every thought is revealed with merciless clarity, setting the stage either for disaster – or for profound and illuminating communion.

And that’s exactly what cellist Yo-Yo Ma brought to the Kennedy Center on Tuesday night, in a transcendent performance of three of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. It may have been the ideal union between brilliant conception and stunning execution; with their austere architecture and limitless depths, the Bach suites feel as if they move with the weight and power of the galaxies. And in Ma’s hands they unfolded with sublime naturalness and grace – majestically revealed, rather than skillfully performed.

The evening opened with the Suite No. 3 in C Major. Relatively the sunniest of the suites, it’s a strong but wonderfully lyrical work. Using bare-bones rubato and minimal ornamentation, Ma infused the dance movements with light, and brought out the intensity and thought that lie at their heart. That was followed with the much darker Suite No. 5 in C Minor. Ma played it with restrained passion, and it took on a meditative presence that suffused the hall.

But the climax of the evening was his radiant, Apollonian reading of the Suite No. 6 in D Major. There’s a sense of vastness about this work, like the inside of a cathedral. Ma not only captured that vastness – he filled it with almost infinite humanity and grace.