Music Reviews : Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax at Chandler Pavilion

Yo-Yo Ma, with the added drawing power of his partner at the piano, Emanuel Ax, packed ‘em into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a Mercedes-Benz-sponsored recital on Sunday evening after packing ‘em in over the weekend as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

More often than not in past recitals, cellist Ma has played to the house, offering the full measure of his intensity and throbbing tone.

On this occasion he and Ax seemed more to be playing to themselves--not to the exclusion of the audience, but hardly with the aim of rousing them to frenzy.

Debussy’s D-minor Sonata, which opened the program, profited from a decisiveness of attack that obviated vaporization in the huge auditorium. The two works by Anton Webern that followed contrasted the 1899 composer of two miniatures that could pass for transcriptions of Brahms songs and, from the same--now distinctive--pen 15 years later, the eerie Three Little Pieces, Opus 11.

The latter are compressed even by the parsimonious standards of the mature Webern, presenting a comprehensive catalogue of cello technique over a span of barely two minutes.

It would have been painlessly instructive to listeners, and hardly too demanding of the performers, if the snippets had been repeated. On Sunday, they were gone in the hacking of an audience cough.

Mendelssohn’s Sonata in D, Opus 58, elicited optimally suave, dynamically restrained response from Ma and Ax. In their hands, the program’s sole bow to soaring passion projected a mellowness better suited to Brahms.

And it was with Brahms that the evening ended: an idiomatic, inexplicably uncredited transcription for cello and piano of the D-minor Sonata, Opus 108, for violin and piano.

Seemingly faithful to Brahms’ original keys throughout, the dark pensiveness of this music easily translates to the deeper, burlier sound of the cello, while the piano part seems minimally, if at all, altered. The performance by Ma and Ax was elegant and eloquent.