Yo-Yo Ma makes Shostakovich concertos the main event with BSO
There aren’t many soloists left on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s contact list who can draw a sold-out crowd to Symphony Hall for one concert, much less four, but if anyone could still do it in this year 2023, it would be cellist Yo-Yo Ma. On paper, this week’s concert — featuring Ma performing both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos — is obviously a banner event in the 2023-24 Symphony Hall season as well as the BSO and music director Andris Nelsons’s decade-long Shostakovich recording project with Deutsche Grammophon. (Anyone else remember when that project was just about Shostakovich’s music composed “under Stalin’s shadow?”) But when it comes to ticket sales, it’s obvious that Shostakovich is not the event. Ma is.
Seating himself at center stage Thursday before the Cello Concerto No. 2, which was performed in the concert’s first half, Ma produced a microphone and addressed the crowd with a brief, eloquent speech. He expressed his admiration for the composer and how he represented “the voice of the voiceless” in music. It was his honor, he said, to perform this concerto “thinking of the people we lose to senseless violence.” A long, solemn applause followed.
Two cello concertos emerged from Shostakovich’s long, fruitful partnership with the great 20th-century Russian cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, but of those two, the Cello Concerto No. 1 has long been the favorite child. Ma recorded it in 1983 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, the year he made his BSO and Tanglewood debuts. Since then, he has performed it on numerous occasions with the BSO and countless other orchestras.
The Cello Concerto No. 2, which Ma played with a score beside him, is less familiar territory for him as well as many listeners, but one could scarcely have asked for a better trail through it than the path he charted with Nelsons and the BSO.
Compared to the Cello Concerto No. 1, No. 2 was not as nakedly virtuosic (though no walk in the park either), but it was more emotionally harrowing. Here the cello brooded resolutely, offset by a carnival melody introduced by the percussion; there it raged in dark outbursts only to be answered by explosive thuds from the bass drum.
When it returned, its voice sounded almost matter-of-fact, as if it had temporarily hardened to whatever horror it had witnessed. At the end of the piece, with its death-rattle jangle from the percussion and subsequent fade into nothingness, Ma held his bow at attention for a significant moment of silence before letting it sink, bringing everyone back home for applause.
Shostakovich has consistently been a strong point for Nelsons and the orchestra under his leadership, and the music seemed to jump off the stage. Listening, I felt like I was paradoxically there and not there; part of me inside the gilded box of Symphony Hall, another part of me marveling at the world as Shostakovich saw it, and imagined it in music.
To end the concert, Ma embraced the Cello Concerto No. 1 like a favorite old friend, with whom conversations feel like second nature. Comfortable, sure, but not complacent; in the second movement’s eerie duet between the cello and celesta, the high-pitched sound of Ma’s cello harmonics was so thin and crystalline that they sounded like a wind instrument. The extended cadenza was pensive, slowly ramping into the sardonic burlesque of the finale, which sent the orchestra hurtling to the finish line with Ma clinging to his cello as if for dear life.
Would there be an encore after two concertos? Could there be? It took two or three ovations before Ma came back out and sat down — at the back of the cello section, joining the musicians for Gautier Capucon’s cello choir arrangement of Shostakovich’s Prelude from Five Pieces for two violins and piano. Well played.
Composer Iman Habibi’s “Zhiân” opened the second half brilliantly. A BSO-commissioned piece, it was inspired by recent protests in the composer’s native Iran and abroad following the September 2022 death of 22year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police. The piece unfolded in shining waves, which were at times overpowering in their intensity, but always undergirded with notes of determination and faith. Haydn’s Symphony No. 22, “The Philosopher,” kicked off the program but felt like an afterthought. Some rough patches in the horns aside, it was the zestiest Classical period symphony I’ve ever heard Nelsons lead with the BSO. It definitely belonged on a BSO program this season, but perhaps not this program.