Harmony of Ideas Strikes a Chord With Ma : Music: The cellist, who appears tonight with Pacific Symphony, wants to see that ‘everybody is working toward an incredible common goal.’

Whatever the words “Yo-Yo Ma” may mean in Chinese, in the United States they mean “great-hearted cellist.” The esteemed artist--who at 19 already was being compared to Casals and Rostropovich--will play with the Pacific Symphony for the first time tonight.

Expect a full-throated performance of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto (to be repeated Thursday night), with vivid attention to details and the tragic-laden emotions. Expect also an unusual degree of collaboration between the soloist, the conductor (Carl St.Clair) and the orchestra: Ma likes “orchestra involvement to the last person” in a performance.

“The ideal relationship is for everybody to come with an incredibly strong point of view and to be incredibly flexible,” he said during a recent interview. “It’s not ‘one leads, one follows,’ not ‘one is head honcho and CEO of the group,’ but rather that, let’s say, everybody comes with 19 possible ways of doing something.

“Then, all right, how should it be now? That’s the best way: to feel this energy that actually everybody is working toward an incredible common goal.”

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Ma was speaking from Ottawa, Canada, where his two performances last week of the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, led by Trevor Pinnock, sold out so quickly that the musicians decided to open the final rehearsal to the public to meet the demand.

Asked what he thinks about while he’s playing, Ma said, “It varies. Sometimes the subject matter deals with the [musical] text, but you always try to go to the next level, to the imagination, rather than vice versa.

“The [Dvorak] text implies a heroic ambivalence. It’s about a hero’s life, and there is a death. You can also think of love and homing instincts: Life and death. The whole thing: Your family, your children.

“You can have flashes of what’s there musically. Sometimes I listen to the incredible rhythmic variety in the non-melodic parts. All the stuff that’s not melodic is unbelievable. It’s easy to tune into the melodies. We love melodies. But there’s all this subliminal stuff bursting with imaginative things that underlies them. Basically, he doesn’t repeat anything, or repeats with just the tiniest changes. That’s another level of listening.”

The concerto, one of Ma’s favorites, is the second major work that Dvorak wrote during a three-year stay in the United States (the “New World Symphony” is the other). While composing it, he learned of the serious illness of his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzova, with whom he once had been in love. To honor her, he incorporated one of her favorite songs, “Leave Me Alone,” into the middle movement.

Josefina died less than a month after Dvorak completed the piece. Returning to his home in Czechoslovakia, he revised the ending, adding further reference to the song and deepening the mood of mourning.

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Ma was born in 1955 in Paris where his parents, both musicians, had moved from Hong Kong. His musical gifts showed up early, but after high school he decided to put a musical career on hold while he majored in humanities at Harvard. There, he met his wife, Jill Horner, an instructor of German literature. They have two children, 12-year-old Nicholas and 9-year-old Emily, with whom they live in Cambridge, Mass.

Though he turned 40 on Saturday, Ma still is considered a youthful genius, and he laughs about the emphasis on youth in the music business: “I’m waiting for [someone to announce] the next ‘in vitro’ violinist. ‘Wait, I hear a faint violin sound! It’s a genius! We don’t know the sex yet, but we know it’s a violinist!’ This gives new meaning to the term ‘ultrasound.’

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“We’re a strange country,” he continued. “We send two messages about culture. One is ‘innovate, innovate and innovate.’ The other is ‘let’s hark back, let’s understand tradition and keep tradition alive.’ The two contradict each other. We have to live within both. But it creates a very good dissonance that forces you to think. . . .”

Although these concerts mark the first time Ma actually will play with the orchestra, he recently was brought in to overdub a part for the Pacific’s recording of Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio,” to be released by Sony next month. Ma said he feels he owes an apology to Timothy Landauer, the orchestra’s own principal cellist, who played the part when the piece premiered at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in April. “He’s wonderful,” said Ma. “But I was asked to do it.”

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St.Clair and Goldenthal attended the dubbing session “so Carl was able to count me through it,” Ma recalled. Asked how much leeway he had having to fit into the orchestra’s prerecorded performance, he answered, “Sometimes it’s good to be straitjacketed. You find ways that somehow work.”

He also said he feels too close to the piece to judge it. “A new piece of music is like having a baby. You always hope and pray that the child will be healthy, have 10 fingers and 10 toes. You do everything possible in the naturing process to help give it the life that it deserves.

“When you’re in the middle of a piece, you are fully its advocate. Ask me a year from now.”

* Yo-Yo Ma will play Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor with the Pacific Symphony led by Carl St.Clair today and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The program also will include Dvorak’s “Carnival” Overture and the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” $15 to $43. (714) 755-5799.