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The Houston Chronicle 3/31/98: Tom McCamus

5:29 PM 3/31/1998 Yo-Yo Ma makes `connections' in miniseries

INSPIRATION and creativity are subjects that television seldom brings to mind, but in the mind of Yo-Yo Ma, television is the perfect connection.
And musical genius Ma has the mind to make it work.

In six hours of stunning images inspired by the music of J.S. Bach, Ma sets out to prove that "my liberal-arts degree is justified: All the arts and sciences are joined together.

"Why can't we talk and work together?" he asks. "And why can't we take a piece of music and actually implant it in the fertile imagination of someone else, and see how it grows in another field?"

That is what he does in Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach, the intriguing, intellectually exciting three-week miniseries starting at 9 tonight on Channel 8.

For openers, cellist Ma plays the music and Bach (played by actor Tom McCamus) recalls the highs and lows of his musical career while world-champion ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean create a dance to Bach's Sixth Suite. Then choreographer Mark Morris overcomes a creative block to dance to Bach's Third Suite.

On April 8, Ma turns actor for the Fourth Suite, playing himself in director Atom Egoyan's original film about music's effect on life, death and a limousine. After that, Kabuki master Tamasaburo Bando seeks a way to make East meet West in Bach's Fifth Suite.

April 15's last hours make the most difficult connections, and maybe the most rewarding. Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy dream of making a music garden with Bach's First Suite. It's fascinating to watch their dream fail in Boston, then blossom in Toronto.

With Bach's Second Suite, Ma goes to Italy to explore music's space in architecture by computer-generating himself and his cello into the famous Carceri prison etchings of 18th-century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. It's not easy, but it's quite a trip.

In this series, the virtuoso cellist is the master communicator, teacher, pitchman and TV host. It was Ma's idea, and he pulls it off.

He found a perfect production connection in Niv Fichman, partner in Canada's Rhombus Media, one of the most important producers of performing-arts programs in the world. The show was five years in the making, and Ma was excited when he presented it to television critics.

"The idea of doing this is to suggest that the important thing is to make connections, to be in touch with the universe around you," he said. "You see a huge flow of ideas, and if you can connect to them, hooray!"

He was intimidated by his collaborators, he said.

"Mark Morris -- well, you saw him. Need I say more?" he said. "Tamasaburo doesn't walk on the streets because he is a national treasure, so he's either carried or he rides. It's very hard to start a conversation. Torvill and Dean love music, but they think, `What world is this guy coming from?' There's a lot to bridge before there's some trust and you can start talking about how to get inside a project and inside a piece of music."

Ma has been playing the cello since he was 4 years old. His parents were Chinese and living in Paris when he was born, but they moved to New York when he was a child. His father was his first teacher, but his principal teacher was Leornard Rose at the Juilliard School. He graduated from Harvard in 1976. He's married and has two children.

He is concerned that today's children are being taught to compete and excel too early.

"If you do it too quickly and if you don't invest in your own emotional bank, you may produce something at an early age but end up actually going bankrupt," he warned. "You get burned out.

"When you're young, you want to play everything fast. You want to prove yourself. Your ego is a little further ahead of yourself. With time, you actually start to discern more things, and you want to tell the stories with more easiness, more simplicity."

© The Houston Chronicle

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