Yo-Yo Ma doesn't do interviews; he does conversations. In Vancouver, on a snowy morning in January, he asks questions, listens intently, struggles to express himself, and speaks with an easygoing mix of colloquialisms, gentle introspection and personal philosophy. His conversation is musical. Small things take on larger significance, they return in different contexts with allusions to deeper themes. A snow storm that has been dogging him across North America is mentioned first anecdotally, but returns as a theme for how adversity changes our perceptions and behaviour. Albert Schweitzer pops up as a Leitmotif, returning as Ma attempts to describe his own view of what it means to be a musician. The African Bush People wander in and out as Ma hunts and gathers through his own large but unprepossessing breadth of cultural knowledge. He doesn't talk about music, but beyond music. If one theme emerges as his central concern, it is how he as a performer can live both in, through and beyond his enduring passion for the cello. 

Ma is the perpetual prodigy, not just because he displayed an eerie technical mastery and musical maturity at an early age, but because he still plays with the intensity and abandon of a young man new to his powers. After countless Dvořák Concerto performances, he still returns to the work with a convincing freshness. He garners again and again that strangest of reviews, in which critics ponder the existential possibility of music that is too beautiful. He has cut the widest swath of any living cellist through the standard repertoire, zealously commissioned new works from a large catalogue of American composers, and wandered off into musical ventures that raise eyebrows on paper, yet convince on recording. And he remains the most genial of superstars. 

Ma is in Vancouver to perform with that city's orchestra; characteristically, he has added an extra work to the programme to pay tribute to the orchestra's late concertmaster. Despite the hectic touring schedule, recording figures prominently in his schedule. His Vancouver concerts follow fast upon his recording of three new American cello concertos – by Richard Danielpour, Christopher Rouse and Leon Kirchner – made with the Philadelphia Orchestra during the Great Blizzard of '96. A new traversal of the Dvořák Cello Concerto is just out, paired with Victor Herbert's Concerto No 2. A Schubert disc with the Trout Quintet and Arpeggione Sonata has just been released, and a collection of chamber works with clarinet by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms is also in the pipeline. 

But much as the standard repertoire and his forays into new music figure large in his schedule, Ma wants to talk about more unorthodox projects. Foremost among these is his return to the Bach cello suites. Ma's first recordings of these works, made when he was 23 years old, remain legendary for their technical precision and lyrical outpouring; if not universally loved, they are none the less a benchmark against which all other recordings, on both period and modern instruments, are inevitably measured. It seems obvious that there might be misgivings or worries when revisiting repertoire so triumphantly mastered two decades earlier. But Ma has no qualms. 

'The music changes as you change, you know?' says Ma, and suddenly the question seems like a foolish one. 'I think that as your life changes, the way you tell stories changes. There is no question that major events in your life, my life the birth of children, having a family , the death of a parent – all of these things thrust you into different roles, a different mode of being. And you either tackle that – or you don't tackle it...' 

And with that Ma bursts, momentarily, into his characteristically unselfconscious laughter. 'You change and incorporate all of these things into yourself, into your music-making, and although it's hard to say exactly what will be different with the music, it is inevitably different.' 

Ma is also returning to the suites with a twist. More and more, collaboration with artists outside of classical music enters into Ma's plans, and his new reading of the suites is being done in conjunction with six other artists or teams of artists. Ma's ambitious project is to work side by side with an architect, a choreographer, a garden designer, a kabuki actor, an ice-dancing duo and a film director. Each will respond to the music and Ma, presumably, will respond to their insights as well. The results will be documented in a series of films (two of which have already been released in the USA). 

'It's a crazy idea in some ways,' says the cellist. 'It just gradually developed as I began thinking about the suites again. I thought, why not make an intense study of six pieces of music and why not really explode them, find their essence, as you would if you were watching a seed grow in different places. You plant this idea in two different areas and you may end up with two very different things, but obviously they are completely related. 

'I wanted to approach the collaboration as a long and slow process of internalizing the music. I don't want to say to any of the people working on the project: "Here, this is the way it should be done." I want to see what we can create together that will be larger than just two artists working together. Then I wanted to work with film, to document over time how the ideas develop and are worked out. I also wanted to avoid the problem of just doing a music video in which the project gets put down on paper and then two days before filming everyone meets and the whole thing gets slapped together. So I thought that, as part of this intense new look at the music, we would all start from the same premise, the same place, and then work together for a year or two, meet, get to know how we think until we're all comfortable with each other's vocabularies, and then see what we can produce.'

For Ma, the rewards are of the hummingbird variety – a massive intake of new artistic calories to sustain his own perpetual artistic motion. 'The whole idea is to work together and to be changed together. It is hard to find new ways of being creative in a recreative profession such as music. We have to continually redo things, in our own lives and from generation to generation. And where do you find ways of redoing things that will allow them to last? So it is an experiment, and if it works it could be incredible.' 

Creating something that lasts can be an obsessive concern for performers whose concert work is as transitory as audience memory, and whose recordings are continually supplanted or crowded by those of other musicians. For Ma, whose ego barely registers on the most sensitive of instruments, it isn't a deep worry, though permanence of some sort is clearly on his mind. One of his Bach collaborators is Boston-based garden designer Julie Messervy. Ma hopes to realize their work together in lasting, tangible form – the landscaping of an eight-acre parcel of land in downtown Boston. 

'For the First Suite, we are going to try to build a contemplative music garden in a very public space outside of City Hall and the Federal Building in Government Center. They have a space that looks good from 20-storeys high, but on the ground it doesn't attract people. So the thought is that if you have thousands of federal workers and city officials who walk to work through this space – if they can actually spend five minutes a day walking there...' 

Ma isn't sure exactly what effect the garden will have, and he resists explaining just exactly how it will relate to the First Suite ('A one-to-one kind of formal correspondence wouldn't be very interesting; it has to be new, and inspired by the music through internalization somehow,' he says). But he hopes that it will have some effect on those who practise the desultory trade of government. 'They make very important decisions everyday that affect people's lives in a very direct way. Perhaps this will give them someplace to walk, to think, give them some kind of breathing space, whatever. Perhaps it will help in some way.' 

Is this naïveté, or idealism? 'Idealism,' says Ma, quickly. 'Idealism is not a naïve philosophy.' Asked to unpack the statement and once again he is off on another trek, again leading far away from the music at hand. 

'It's very simple. I once took an anthropology course in which we studied the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert. I fell in love with one of the films we saw – Bitter Melons – in which there was a blind musician. He played with a stick and gourd and sang a very simple song which I have actually tried to learn and think about and now realize is very complex, mysterious, beautiful and whole. I'd always wanted to go see these people, this pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer society. I was fascinated by them, by their very peaceful society in which arguments get solved by just talking for days. 

'So, I thought to myself, one day I am going to go there. A few years ago I got a film crew together from a French and an English television station and we went to 12 villages in Namibia. We listened to their music which is not performed, it just happens. In a way it was a form of imaging – they would play something to themselves before a hunt, or in one of their trance dances which is their most complex ritual. What they did was a form of music, medicine, religion – there was a healing part – and also exorcizing. I was warned by various anthropologists that once you go there it really stays with you, it affects you. I was going to a very strange place and I was terrified, by the remoteness, and the vastness of the land, and the depth of what is going on there in that society. And afterwards, continuing to today, whenever I have a doubt about what we are doing as musicians – doubts about high art or classical music – I think back to these images and remember that there is a very obvious reason why we are doing this. We build up so many layers of sophistication, but you can't get away from those basic meanings of music.

'It has actually changed the way I look at my children playing music, and it's made me want to go back to playing with amateur musicians, to kinds of music-making where there isn't a gap between stage and audience. Music is a community act, a participation, or at least we should all strive to get to that point. Even though we obviously have hierarchy galore in our profession, you have got to get to the place where we can meet, where we can all meet. Otherwise, good music won't happen.' 

Ma has told a familiar story, one that he shares often with interviewers. But he has also told a familiar story in a larger sense; there is a strain of Rousseau in his idealism, and as he tries to articulate his vision of the musician in the world, he turns again and again to the past – his past, or the historical past – to find halcyon allegories. Ma remembers his own college days at Harvard as a kind of ideal musical world, one in which he was not just a musician, but a student, a participant in amateur musicales, a full citizen of a larger kind of polis ('It was a time to study anything, everything, the Introduction to Whatever: Russian literature, anthropology, how to sustain friendships...'). He turns to Albert Schweitzer when looking for connections between music and humanitarianism. And, when he makes a brief foray into talking about music, he once again shows a fascination for a lost world in which he seems to find evidence of an inextricable connection between music, friendship and education. The subject is Victor Herbert, cellist, composer and an indelible figure in American music, and Dvořák, whose Cello Concerto was premiered 100 years ago on March 19, 1896. 

'They were friends, colleagues, they played chamber music together and collaborated on projects – that's documented,' says Ma admiringly. 'They taught together at the same conservatory in New York, and Herbert's concerto had a strong influence on Dvořák. Six months after hearing Herbert's, he started his own concerto. Dvořák was also such an incredible force in American music, in such a small number of years. The students that he and Herbert taught at the National Conservatory went on to be the teachers of Duke Ellington, Copland, Gershwin. He wasn't praised for that, and he has been put down in Europe, first for going to America and then because of his artistic interest in folk music. But he was an incredible figure who was constantly looking around for new directions, new ideas. He taught that to his students, he taught them that you really can create different models. He steered students in new directions that were vital for American music.' 

Ma considers the new recording made with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic – for reasons both artistic and symbolic – as a broad tribute to Dvořák and Herbert. It is also something of a personal debt. The Dvořák brings Ma pleasure, and it has brought him repeated concert successes. He's paying the old man back. And once again, of course, there's no fear about saying something the same way twice. 'If you know something really well and internalize it, by the time it comes back out it is different. That is the mystery of music, it is never just the sum of its notes, it is something you can't quantify. Even if I were Tovey, or Charles Rosen, and I could tell you everything about a piece of music, if you listen to it you will find something else.' 

The question of returning to old repertoire once again inspires Ma to reprise an earlier theme from the conversation, remembering a famous Carnegie Hall concert in which he performed all six Bach cello suites in one afternoon. This time he recalls the Bach suites to tell an anecdote of the travelling musician – and make a wry comment on the human condition. After the gruelling concert, the first time he had ever attempted to perform all six suites at once, Ma went out on the town. Returning to his in-laws' apartment at 3am, he found the door locked, and no one could hear his knocking. And so he curled up in his overcoat outside the door, and tried to sleep as the maintenance men and newspaper delivery boys clanged about on the elevator. 

'That concert had meant so much to me,' says Ma. 'I had never tried something like that before and it was exhausting. And then three hours later, I'm a homeless person. That's the life of a musician. It was January, it was freezing, it was ridiculous,' he says, laughing. 

When reminded that the same concert was also on the eve of the Gulf War, and that he had made a brief, touching plea for sanity from the stage, Ma turns serious again. 'There's been unbelievable violence in this century, and so much of art in the 20th century is a document of that violence. For decades we've all struggled to understand what this is all about. I remember growing up in the Cold War. I just assumed that this is the way the world would be for the next couple of centuries: go to the Berlin Wall, it's there, it 's never coming down. It seems that every day you are confronted by evidence that nothing ever changes, always more violence, more Somalia, more Bosnia, more Cambodia. But then on the other hand something like this can always change. 

'There is incredible violence in the three concertos that I have just recorded. All of them deal with that in some way, especially Chris Rouse's, which is all about dying. But even though some of these pieces are very turgid, very violent, each has a centre to it – a Monteverdi quote, a Bach chorale with wrong notes – and that very much shows an awareness of a meaningful past and hope of some sort of catharsis, something. Wherever you look there is hope, but sometimes you have to dig and dig and dig to find it. You can't play and perform unless you are led by something, some tiny, tiny bit of hope. People can't live without hope, and you can't compose without hope. Otherwise a work would be totally nihilistic and why would someone write it? Even the act of writing is an expression of someone saying, "I want you to know how horrible I feel". Saying "Help!"' 

And then one final time, Ma defends his idealism. 'It is something that you have to actually work at; it's not naïve, but it's difficult. My biggest struggle is to be sure that I live one life, that you don't split yourself so that one day you do one nice thing and then the next day you do something not so good. You may advance yourself by splitting yourself up, focusing, specializing, behaving one way one day, and a different way the next. But I can't do that. I try my damnedest to live all in one thing, to be a complete person. The danger for a travelling musician is that you can split yourself into as many pieces as you want to, because the mind easily does that. For me, if I can create a balanced life, where I am operating from a central core and I am answerable and accountable for every little piece of me that gets split off, then I can afford to be idealistic, because then what I say is what I do.'

With that, the travelling musician and occasional polymath is off to buy a new suitcase. Then, presumably, a rehearsal and a concert, and another city. The musician who is trying to live whole is in a hurry, but for a moment it's easy to believe that, somehow, the man who has everything has also been given the gift of optimism and faith.

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