{"id":22091,"date":"2015-11-17T19:30:03","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T02:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/?p=22091"},"modified":"2015-11-20T00:15:19","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T07:15:19","slug":"yo-yo-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/2015\/11\/yo-yo-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"Yo Yo Ma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Concert<\/p>\n

Yo-Yo Ma, cello
\nKathryn Stott, piano<\/p>\n

Celebrity Series of Boston<\/a>
\nSymphony Hall, Boston<\/p>\n

\nMaurice Ravel, Apr\u00e8s un r\u00eave (After a dream)<\/em><\/p>\n

Arc of Life Suite<\/em>
\nJ.S. Bach, arr. Gounod, Ave Maria<\/em>
\nJean Sibelius, Was it a dream? Opus 27, no. 4<\/em>
\nJacob Gade, Tango Jalousie<\/em>
\nClaude Debussy, Beau soir<\/em>
\nFranz Schubert, Ave Maria, D. 839<\/em><\/p>\n

Dmitri Shostakovitch
\nCello Sonata in D minor, Opus 40<\/em><\/p>\n

Giovanni Sollima
\nI’ bell’Antonio, Tema III<\/em><\/p>\n

Cesar Frank
\nSonata in A Major for violin (cello) and piano<\/em><\/div>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Suzanne<\/a>
Suzanne Clark<\/a>
“Cello Head in Red and Blue” (2010)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The great Boston-based cellist and long-time collaborator pianist Kathryn Stott drive one in for the home team.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

With a program that began with a compendium of small dramatic pieces and emerged into a program featuring two great sonatas, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and longtime collaborator, pianist Kathryn Stott, wowed the standing room only crowd at Symphony Hall on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n

\"Yo-Yo<\/a>
Yo-Yo Ma<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The initial compendium of short pieces grouped under the title Arc of Life<\/em> was preceded, as announced by Ma at the outset, by Apr\u00e8s un r\u00eave<\/em> by Maurice Ravel in tribute to those lost last Friday in the Paris terrorist attacks. Its ending phrase struck called out to Song of the Birds<\/em>, composed by the late great cellist and peace activist Pablo Casals. <\/p>\n

A meditative yet romantic piece, rendered with color and feeling by both players, Apr\u00e8s un r\u00eave<\/em> led immediately into the set which began with the Ave Maria<\/em> arrangement by Gounod based on Bach’s first prelude in The Well Tempered Clavier<\/em> and ended with the simple heartbreaking themes of Schubert’s version of Ave Maria<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Sandwiched in the middle, delightfully, were Sibelius’ urgent and cinematic Was it a dream?<\/em>, a nuanced and varied tango written in 1925 by Danish composer Jacob Gade, and the dark and rich Beau Soir<\/em> by Debussy replete with large swaths of sound.<\/p>\n

Though challenging in some spots, the Shostakovitch sonata is generally a more lyrical and less tempestuous piece than is his noted and fantastically difficult Cello Concerto #1<\/em>. Ma and Stott played it beautifully, capturing the lyricism at the outset, and the more playful, circus-like elements evident in the internal movements. <\/p>\n

The long initial Allegro non troppo<\/em> evoked urgency, filled with intense pizzicato with repeated recapitulations of the initial theme punctuated with probing, almost plodding, internal regions. The second movement Allegro <\/em>conveys a seriously intense peasant dance, giving Ma’s riveting technique an opportunity to shine. Turbulent runs, up and down, yield to an earthilygruff scrubbing at the end, The Largo <\/em>was wonderfully meditative and filled with a sense of the luminous, a challenging probe into the unknown. The final Allegro <\/em>began with the delightfully characteristic Shostakovitch circus music followed by furiously tumbling skeins of notes that again show the master cellist’s technique to the fullest.<\/p>\n

\"Yo-Yo<\/a>
Yo-Yo Ma, cello
Kathryn Stott, piano
Photo: Robert Torres<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After the intermission, the duo played a short, atmospheric, somewhat minimalist piece by the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima, born in 1962, which, after its non-unlike-Philip-Glass-nesses, wandered beautifully up to the sky at its conclusion.<\/p>\n

The familiar and experienced duo then launched into the Franck sonata. Certainly demanding in many places, the Franck also establishes a romantic landscape rich at times with anticipations of Rachmaninoff. In its initial Allegretto Moderato<\/em>, the sense of the impressionistic, of Monet fields, prevails at first before a sense of the more substantially novelistic enters the fray. <\/p>\n

In the succeeding Allegro<\/em>, a wandering sense leads into a plaintive mood, with very earnest roiling both in cello and piano developing from these. A subtle and light recapitulation yields finally to a dramatic ending that feeds right into the Recitativo-Fantasia<\/em>, a heavenly, intensely sustained intervention. The final Allegretto poco mosso<\/em> with its lovely flowing melody suggests a seaside town looking of an expanse, its themes bordering on pictorial swaths of vast expanses of blue.<\/p>\n

After the first standing ovation the pair played, in honor of a couple Ma knew in the audience who were celebrating a wedding anniversary, Elgar’s wonderfully tuneful and sweet Salut d’Amour<\/em>, also exhibiting a wonderful collaborative engagement between the celebrate cellist and his distinctively competent pianist. <\/p>\n

A fantastically tuneful and jazzy showpiece, Prelude #1<\/em> by Gershwin, followed, and after that the resplendently lovely and lyrical Valse Sentimentale<\/em> by Tchaikovsky, each of which drew further standing ovations. <\/p>\n

Finally, after making warmly joking gestures about going to bed, Ma without cello and Stott emerged for their final bow.<\/p>\n

– BADMan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Concert
\nYo-Yo Ma, cello
\nKathryn Stott, piano
\nCelebrity Series of Boston<\/a>
\nSymphony Hall, Boston<\/strong>
\nThe great Boston-based cellist and his long-time piannistic collaborator drive one in for the home team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-concerts","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22091"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22135,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22091\/revisions\/22135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}