Yo-Yo Ma was his spirited self Friday at the Kimmel. But what was up with the audience?

Yo-Yo Ma brings the party with him. On Sesame Street, the classical cellist was the gentle hand of an art form ushering in new generations. He’s still a reliably big draw at opening night of any orchestra. And he’s blithely hopped walls between genres. No classical artist has been more gregarious.

Friday night the party came to the Kimmel Center, where the vibe in a nearly full Verizon Hall was chill and giddy. The trademark Ma personality was all there — the sincerity, the mugging for audience laughs, and puckish teasing of his stage partner, pianist Kathryn Stott.

But when lights went down, it was a cellist and his music, and as an artist Ma is not a big personality.

“Speaking truth to power,” Ma suggested to the Verizon Hall audience, is what Shostakovich’s Soviet-era Cello Sonata in D Minor was about. Whether Ma was speaking historically or perhaps referring to the recent death of Alexei Navalny in Putin’s Russia wasn’t clear, but the work brought the best moments in the recital.

Paradoxically, Ma was at his most intense emotionally in the quiet, lonely passages of the third movement, where the music sounds like a note from the gulag. Using inflections with the subtlety of a human voice, Ma’s urgency grew to desperation, and then fell away into a quiet so weak it was hopelessness itself. Stott’s upper-register melody response floated above like poignant commentary on the scene below.

Many in the audience fidgeted in their seats, not totally with the music. Maybe they came for something else (and later in the program they got it), but repertoire is almost always a give and take, and it seems likely that something in Shostakovich’s depths or the quick, sardonic final movement made an impression.

Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, from 1978, had an accessibility factor no more challenging than a meditation session, with its slow, mesmerizing, major-key journey (and accompanying projected images of space and the natural world). And yet there was an unbelievable amount of coughing in the audience. Too bad the noise kept snapping listeners back into reality and the piece’s newly important role as an escape couldn’t be fully appreciated.

A transcription for cello and piano of Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major was most notable for Stott’s beautifully expressive passages, and an interpretation from Ma that tended to be a bit cool.

But in a set of short opening pieces — by Fauré, Nadia Boulanger, Dvořák, and Sérgio Assad — Ma and Stott gave glimpses at various aspects of their personalities.

And then, two encores joined the Shostakovich in showing why we love Ma the way we do. His rich lower register in “Prayer” from Bloch’s From Jewish Life seemed to fill the entire hall, so great was its presence. And Cristal by Brazilian pianist and composer César Camargo Mariano carried the essential spirit of a cellist who arrived in the classical realm decades ago and, thankfully, never forgot how to have fun.

Next recital in the Spotlight Series at the Kimmel: pianist Yuja Wang, April 30 at 8 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets are $99-$299. ensembleartsphilly.org, 215-893-1999.