That first go, he said with a laugh, “is like youthful ‘I know everything.’ The second is middle-aged confusion.”

That second recording, “Inspired by Bach,” was released in the late 1990s, accompanied by ingenious films that depicted the ever-inquisitive Mr. Ma in collaboration with artists from other disciplines: a landscape architect, the choreographer Mark Morris, the etchings of Piranesi, ice dancers. He’s right that there’s an element of bewilderment — or, at least, the modesty of maturity — in this more ruminative, less rhythmically moored take.

The Fifth Suite, in the 1983 album, has the haunted beauty of an empty Venetian palazzo, with prevailing gloom shot with sudden shafts of blinding sunlight. In 1998, the same suite feels milder and more summery, the overarching condition one of restorative shade rather than stark shadow.

Between the two recordings, Mr. Ma gradually moved from instrumentalist to icon. (When Kramer gets hit in the head on a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld,” he starts randomly blurting out “Yo-Yo Ma.”)

“It happened over time,” Ms. Buerkle said. “It wasn’t like there was a magic moment. Over a long period of time, incrementally, you become the go-to person. It’s such a strange thing in this business. You become, at some point, the household name.”

Mr. Ma took that status seriously and has used it to richer effect than the rest of the tiny handful of classical musicians at his level of renown. In 1998, he started the Silk Road Project, dedicated to genially exploring cross-cultural artistic connections, out of which emerged the constantly touring Silk Road Ensemble. Now a grandfather, he has aged easily into the role of global-citizen humanist, lecturing on the role of artists and culture in a fraying society. (The question is whether his “days of action” will have the substance, beyond photo ops, to match his good intentions.)