Yo-Yo Ma
REVIEW: SCRUTINY | Planetary Humanism: Yo-Yo Ma Brings His Message Of Hope And Healing to Toronto
By Michelle Assay
It’s not every day that you enter a concert hall 15 minutes early only to find the artist already on stage, chatting to the audience.
And, when the artist is the legendary cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, you can’t help but curse the snail’s-pace subway that prevented you from arriving even earlier.
As the Roy Thomson Hall gradually filled, Ma continued answering questions from the floor: ‘Welcome. Ask me anything’ read the display on two screens above the stage. Audience members obliged with questions ranging from emotional engagement with music to a young lad’s concerns about his lack of motivation when practising the violin.
“You have a magic button inside you,” a beaming Ma responded, “which turns something you think you should do to something you want to do. Only you can flick that switch and make the instrument your friend.”
I doubt the young aspiring musician would miss his next practice slot. Midway through his next response, Ma was handed his cello, and the lights were dimmed to signal the official start of the Evening with Yo-Yo Ma: Reflections in Words and Music.
These days it is not unusual for star performers not to provide audiences with a program prior to the event. Pianist András Schiff is a notable example, as in his recent recital at the Koerner Hall, where he announced and explained each piece from the podium, effectively turning the evening into a lecture-recital. But, Yo-Yo Ma’s evening was something altogether different. It was nothing less than a celebration of humanity and hope, through music that connects and heals, all arising from decades of reflection on why musicians do what they do.
Appropriately enough, the program opened with New Brunswick Indigenous composer George Paul’s Mi’kmaq Honour Song — anthem-like and elemental, calling for unity and respect. Ma has long been advocating for this piece, and he included it on his 2021 Notes for the Future album.
His shout-out ‘Good evening, Toronto; Elbows Up!’ immediately brought the house down.
After some thoughts on the nature of gratitude and ‘what it means to be us’, he began his reminiscences about his childhood and the time when, under the thumb of Tiger parents, he felt emotionally and physically unsafe. “But I had a friend,” he added, “who could suspend time, during which I felt safe.” Cue Bach’s First Cello Suite in its entirety, and cue the audience’s cheerful anticipatory gasp. To see Ma perform is a transforming experience. He lives and breathes his music, and nowhere more touchingly than when he plays Bach.
“What is it in human nature that makes us so cruel to one another?” he asked poignantly.
An excerpt from Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto gave as good a musical answer as any. The last movement from George Crumb’s Sonata for Solo Cello then epitomized the frenetic excitement of New York, where Ma and his family moved when he was seven.
Ma is a master storyteller, moving seamlessly from his life journey to deeper philosophical ruminations, and pausing to reflect on his dilemma in choosing between obedience to his father and being true to himself. He chose the latter path. A remark from his teacher, Leon Kirchner, about the young student not having found his ‘sound’ sent him off on a quest to find not just ‘my sound’ but ‘our sound’.
A parade of excerpts followed, celebrating the sounds of countries, cultures and regions, from Piazzola to Bloch, from Mashrou’ Leila to Ahmet Adnan Saygun. Stylistic and temporal barriers were dissolved, as the ‘College Hornpipe’ metamorphosed into Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. A medley then encapsulated the sound of the ‘American soul’, embracing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, Dvořák’s setting of ‘Goin’ Home’ in the New World Symphony, and the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve seen’ — all utterly mesmerising.
What else but Bach’s elegantly mournful Fifth Cello Suite could have risen to Ma’s call for music as ‘energy, medicine for times of joy, tragedy, change; for sorrow and loss’? The Prelude from the Sixth Suite then accompanied majestic images of Paris’s reopened Notre Dame. A quick conversation on the cello with Roger Payne’s recording of humpback whales led to thoughts on the relationship between ourselves and nature, and fear for the future of humanity.
“I want to make sure we don’t sleepwalk into World War III,” the soon-to-be-70 cellist warned. “Our job is to make sure nobody is ever just a statistic,” came as a solemn but subtle reminder of ongoing civilian sufferings.