Among their many other musical activities, Kathryn Stott and Yo-Yo Ma have been playing concerts as a duo for 46 years. In last night’s recital, the extent of the intimacy between them was clear for all to see: here were two people with complete musical knowledge of each other being simply happy to be in a room playing for their friends – the Platonic ideal of chamber music. Close your eyes and you were in one of their living rooms, not in the 1,943 capacity Barbican Hall.
People wanting to pick a highlight will have had many to choose from: mine was Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, ten minutes of pure escape and meditation. Stott produced the insistent three-note piano figures with perfect regularity; the individual piano chords which punctuate the pattern at irregular places and pitches rang out like bells, every one a surprise and delight. Ma’s gently rising and falling cello figures showed that even the simplest music can be played with boundless depths of expression.
Listening to Ma playing cello is like listening to a singer who can’t produce consonants but has inexhaustible reserves of breath, as well as the ability to inject a subtly different meaning into every phrase. Starting with Fauré’s Berceuse and continuing with an arrangement of Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, the majority of the music in the recital gave Ma the opportunity to show off his exceptional cantabile and purity of tone at every point in the cello’s register.
Stott is an exceptional chamber musician, always matching her levels precisely to what would work best with her partner, but without any compromise in ability to contribute tonal colour or rhythmic interest. She will be hanging up her concert-giving boots at the end of the year, so this concert had the flavour of a “farewell tour”. Like the duo’s latest album, with the one word title Merci, many of the pieces paid tribute to musicians who have gone before them. Stott was taught by Nadia Boulanger and Ma by Boulanger’s student Luise Vosgerchian, so the composer’s Cantique played a prominent role. Maurice Maeterlinck’s words, reproduced in Ma’s contribution to the programme notes, are impenetrable, but the long-breathed melody is deliriously lovely.
Each half of the recital ended with an important sonata. In a concert where the music was overwhelmingly gentle and tender, Shostakovich’s Sonata in D minor for cello and piano was the one piece which didn’t convince. Described by Ma as “speaking truth to power”, this is music which can display the full weight of its composer’s mischievous irony as well as his lyrical gifts – it can really go quite off the rails in places – and this performance, while highly listenable, was anything but edgy. Franck’s Sonata in A major however, closed the concert in style – quite the delicious wedding gift its composer intended.
The pair love playing tango – Stott’s 2008 Guardian article “I’ve been tangoed” makes splendid reading – and oddly, the Dvořák song played earlier has distinct overtones of a tango melody. So it was unsurprising that they gave us a tango for the second of two encores, Cristal by Brazilian composer César Camargo Mariano. From the relish and youthful energy with which they delivered it, I’m struggling to believe that this month’s concerts will be their last together. Expect a comeback tour at some point.
