Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott celebrate long and beautiful friendship
Ask a person who doesn’t listen to classical music regularly if they know who Yo-Yo Ma is, and there’s a fighting chance the answer will be yes. Ask that same person if they know who Kathryn Stott is, and they probably won’t even know that she’s a pianist. Between the two of them, Ma’s name and acclaim may be the thing that fills auditoriums all over the world, including Symphony Hall on Tuesday night. However, from the moment the longtime collaborators first appeared on the stage, it was clear that this wasn’t an evening in the spotlight for Ma, but a celebration of the long and beautiful friendship between Ma and Stott.
That friendship dates back to 1978, when, according to an interview Stott did with a North Carolina radio station, someone Stott was living with subleased their room to Ma and his wife, Jill, without telling Stott, and so the pianist “just opened the door and found him there.” The two struck up a creative partnership shortly afterward, and the first of nine Celebrity Series of Boston appearances by the duo came in December 1988. Thirty-five years and three months later, Tuesday’s concert marked a final bow together for the longstanding duo, as Stott plans to retire from public performance in December of this year.
Ma showered the pianist with gratitude at every possible juncture: “for her friendship, for her creative spirit,” and everything else she brought to their relationship, he said. Early on in the evening, he proudly announced that she had curated the program, which featured themes meditating on the cycle of life and the connections between generations, both specifically and broadly.
Ma and Stott’s musical lineages are united in the French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger; Stott studied with Boulanger as a child, and Ma studied with Boulanger’s student, Luise Vosgerschian, at Harvard University. Boulanger herself studied with Gabriel Fauré, whose music spread to the United States through her advocacy. Fittingly, the suite of short songs that began the evening was bookended with Fauré — first a delicate and bittersweet “Berceuse”, and last a dryly whimsical “Papillon.” On the way through, the duo imbued Dvorák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and Boulanger’s “Cantique” with solemn luminosity, and splashed bright color onto Sérgio Assad’s “Menino.”
The notion that collaborative pianists should be unobtrusive background furniture for the star soloist has long been out of fashion, but Ma and Stott’s symbiotic soloist/pianist connection was superbly dynamic even by modern standards. Ma was seated to Stott’s right and only slightly toward the front of the stage, so he could easily look at her, and he often closely watched her while she played during his tacets.
Together, they rode the same mental wavelength. Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D minor rocked the house with gutsy gusto. After intermission, Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel,” composed the same year Ma and Stott met, provided musicians and audience with a poignant meditative moment. As the notes on the page go, “Spiegel” might be one of the most straightforward pieces in the modern repertoire, but performing the piece well requires a certain amount of perspective, which Ma and Stott have long acquired.
The program concluded with Franck’s Sonata in A Major for violin and piano, in its well known cello/piano arrangement by Jules Delsart, and it was everything one could have wanted from a Ma/Stott performance: an old chestnut played with gravitas and grace, as if it was both the first and last time its audience would ever hear it. As Stott charged ahead on the keyboard in the final canon and Ma played with his face tilted skyward, the pair looked as if they had fused into one entity, two-faced à la Janus — appropriately, the Roman god whose dominion includes beginnings and endings.
Meeting the audience’s applause, the two gestured back and forth at each other — you bow first! no, you first! — before saying farewell with two substantial encores, Ernest Bloch’s “Prayer” and Brazilian composer César Camargo Mariano’s “Cristal.” The latter was anchored by Stott’s punchy groove on the piano, while Ma’s cello gleefully bounced along, seemingly content to take the back seat. Happy trails, Kathy. You’ll be missed.