San Francisco Classical Voice

Sony Records is not a company to pass up the chance of a good sequel. Fiddler Mark O'Connor, bassist Edgar Meyer, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma came together under Sony's auspices for the enormously successful album titled "Appalachia Waltz"; a second album from the trio, "Appalachian Journey," was released last week, and the musicians' carefully-timed nationwide tour landed them at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall Sunday afternoon. I feared the worst from such a baldly commercial enterprise; but the concert was actually terrific fun-three virtuosi, secure in their own musicianship and casually challenging one another.

Yo-Yo Ma's was certainly the biggest name on the program, but in the event he spent most of his time blending skillfully into the musical background. The concert was, in fact, yet another illustration of Ma's supreme gift of adaptation. There was none of the usual painful awkwardness of "crossover" here. Ma matched O'Connor's plain fiddle timbre beautifully. And he managed to combine a quite astonishing ease in very difficult material (O'Connor's music frequently sent him for long stretches into what most composers would call high viola range) with a disarming absence of "glitz."

The surprise was the undemonstrative character of most of Ma's music. Apart from a wicked solo in a number called "Druid Fluid" (Ma announced, with somewhat mysterious pride, that he had named this piece himself), his technical challenges were of the sort that only fellow-players are likely to appreciate. There was, for example, a lot of very high playing, sometimes in octaves with the violin, sometimes just as one element in an complex, interlocking texture, with the bass way up in the usual cello range.

O'Connor himself has an economy of technique that most violinists would kill for. His left hand is agile and perfectly precise (as it has to be, in a style where vibrato is an occasional luxury). His right is a marvel, capable of exceptional delicacy and also of brute power. When Ma broke a string midway through the second half, O'Connor filled up the pause with an extended excerpt from his second Fiddle Concerto--an excerpt that revealed a mean sautillé as well as deadly accurate intonation. The second of the group's three (unnamed) encores had O'Connor articulating blisteringly fast sextuplets with such control that it took an effort of visual concentration to be certain that the bow was moving at all.

But the real star, somewhat surprisingly, was bassist Edgar Meyer. There can't be many bass players out there who can get around the instrument with this sort of casual ease. Meyer was all over the place, running up and down the fingerboard, hitting high harmonics out of the blue, sliding and slithering from one end of the instrument to the other. The amplification lent his bass an ominous, throaty rasp. (It seemed from the setup that all three instruments were miked, but only the bass was audibly amplified.) Every tune that relied on a bass lick was an irresistible delight (I'm thinking especially of "Schizoozy," a brief number anchored by a dashing bass ritornello).

And the music? It was catchy, virtuosic, and innocently fun. The slightly-varied repetitions and the spirited instrumental hi-jinks kept reminding me obscurely of something. Finally, I realized that I was thinking of 17th-century music, of the thirst for varied repetition that made both for Biber's exuberant sonatas and for innumerable anonymous "Divisions to a Ground." This was music of the same humor-intricate and difficult, but playful, as though the fun of playing tricky licks and the fun of thinking them up were pretty much the same thing. As maybe they are.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved