Roy Thomson Corridor Presents: An Night with Yo-Yo Ma: Reflections in Phrases and Music; Yo-Yo Ma, cello. June 6, 2025, Roy Thomson Corridor.
It’s not each day that you simply enter a live performance corridor quarter-hour early solely to seek out the artist already on stage, chatting to the viewers.
And, when the artist is the legendary cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, you possibly can’t assist however curse the snail’s-pace subway that prevented you from arriving even earlier.
Because the Roy Thomson Corridor step by step crammed, Ma continued answering questions from the ground: ‘Welcome. Ask me something’ learn the show on two screens above the stage. Viewers members obliged with questions starting from emotional engagement with music to a younger lad’s issues about his lack of motivation when practising the violin.
“You will have a magic button inside you,” a beaming Ma responded, “which turns one thing you assume it is best to do to one thing you wish to do. Solely you possibly can flick that change and make the instrument your good friend.”
I doubt the younger aspiring musician would miss his subsequent observe slot. Halfway by way of his subsequent response, Ma was handed his cello, and the lights had been dimmed to sign the official begin of the Night with Yo-Yo Ma: Reflections in Phrases and Music.
Storytelling, Efficiency
Nowadays it isn’t uncommon for star performers to not present audiences with a program previous to the occasion. Pianist András Schiff is a notable instance, as in his current recital on the Koerner Corridor, the place he introduced and defined each bit from the rostrum, successfully turning the night right into a lecture-recital. However, Yo-Yo Ma’s night was one thing altogether totally different. It was nothing lower than a celebration of humanity and hope, by way of music that connects and heals, all arising from a long time of reflection on why musicians do what they do.
Appropriately sufficient, this system opened with New Brunswick Indigenous composer George Paul’s Mi’kmaq Honour Track — anthem-like and elemental, calling for unity and respect. Ma has lengthy been advocating for this piece, and he included it on his 2021 Notes for the Future album.
His shout-out ‘Good night, Toronto; Elbows Up!’ instantly introduced the home down.
After some ideas on the character of gratitude and ‘what it means to be us’, he started his reminiscences about his childhood and the time when, beneath the thumb of Tiger mother and father, he felt emotionally and bodily unsafe. “However I had a good friend,” he added, “who might droop time, throughout which I felt protected.” Cue Bach’s First Cello Suite in its entirety, and cue the viewers’s cheerful anticipatory gasp. To see Ma carry out is a reworking expertise. He lives and breathes his music, and nowhere extra touchingly than when he performs Bach.
Born in Paris, Ma’s earliest recollections are intertwined with the shadows of World Warfare II, nonetheless lingering ten years after its conclusion.
“What’s it in human nature that makes us so merciless to at least one one other?” he requested poignantly.
An excerpt from Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto gave nearly as good a musical reply as any. The final motion from George Crumb’s Sonata for Solo Cello then epitomized the frenetic pleasure of New York, the place Ma and his household moved when he was seven.
Ma is a grasp storyteller, transferring seamlessly from his life journey to deeper philosophical ruminations, and pausing to replicate on his dilemma in selecting between obedience to his father and being true to himself. He selected the latter path. A comment from his trainer, Leon Kirchner, in regards to the younger pupil not having discovered his ‘sound’ despatched him off on a quest to seek out not simply ‘my sound’ however ‘our sound’.
A parade of excerpts adopted, celebrating the sounds of nations, cultures and areas, from Piazzola to Bloch, from Mashrou’ Leila to Ahmet Adnan Saygun. Stylistic and temporal limitations had been dissolved, because the ‘School 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’ Residence’ within the New World Symphony, and the non secular ‘No person Is aware of the Hassle I’ve seen’ — all completely mesmerising.
Music For Humanity
What else however Bach’s elegantly mournful Fifth Cello Suite might have risen to Ma’s name for music as ‘vitality, drugs for instances of pleasure, tragedy, change; for sorrow and loss’? The Prelude from the Sixth Suite then accompanied majestic photos of Paris’s reopened Notre Dame. A fast dialog on the cello with Roger Payne’s recording of humpback whales led to ideas on the connection between ourselves and nature, and concern for the way forward for humanity.
“I wish to ensure we don’t sleepwalk into World Warfare III,” the soon-to-be-70 cellist warned. “Our job is to verify no one is ever only a statistic,” got here as a solemn however refined reminder of ongoing civilian sufferings.
“We mentioned by no means once more,” was most likely essentially the most overt political assertion of the night: not pointing the finger, however not needing to.
But, Ma’s final message transcended the on a regular basis, looking for a brand new humanism, ‘the sum of all knowledge’, what he summed up as ‘planetary humanism’. A magical compilation of photos from the James Webb and Hubble Telescopes then accompanied Arvo Pärt’s hypnotic Spiegel im Spiegel over a recording of the piano half by the younger astrophysicist-pianist, Amir Siraj. Maya Angelou’s ‘A Courageous and Startling Reality’ stored us on an elevated stage.
Maybe you needed to be there with a purpose to respect that every one this high-flown philosophy was a lot greater than ‘sanctimonious piety’ (Angelou’s phrases). In the long run, music, phrases, and group introduced the night to a quietly transferring shut, as Ma and the viewers joined in singing ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ – ‘Give us Peace’.
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Michelle Assay is a Marie Curie/UKRI International Fellow on the Universities of Toronto and King’s School London engaged on Girls and Western Artwork Music in Iran (Womusiran.com). She holds a PhD from the Sorbonne and College of Sheffield and has been a Leverhulme Fellow on the College of Huddersfield. She is the creator of award-winning articles on Russian and Soviet music and on Shakespeare and music, and recurrently seems in concert events as a pianist. She is a daily broadcaster for the BBC and contributor to Gramophone, Worldwide Piano, and Bachtrack, together with Ludwig Van.
