For Carnegie Hall’s Annual Isaac Stern Memorial Concert, longtime friends and collaborators Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott offered a luminous recital in honor of the late violinist who led the charge to save the venue from demolition in the 1960s. This concert marked the artists’ last planned New York appearance before Stott retires from public performance at the end of 2024. As Ma explained to the audience, the program (curated by Stott) was also a celebration of the nearly four decades the two have spent together, with each piece offering a glimpse into their shared explorations.
Fittingly, the opening suite of five miniatures began and ended with Gabriel Fauré, friend and mentor of the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, with whom Stott studied as a child and whose student, Luise Vosgerchian, was Ma’s professor at Harvard University. Starting with one of Fauré’s most popular pieces, the tenderly affecting Berceuse, it ended with the effervescent Papillon. In between, the pair offered radiant renditions of Antonín Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me and Boulanger’s Cantique and imbued Brazilian composer-guitarist Sérgio Assad’s Menino with restlessness and vibrant color. These brief pieces set the tone for the evening – alternately intimate, wandering, wistful and exhilarating – and offered ample evidence of the duo's superb on-stage chemistry and abundant artistry.
The melancholic melodies in the opening set contrasted mightily with the biting irony of the work that followed, Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D minor, delivered with eloquence and panache. Ma’s playing was fine throughout, his deep and rich tone unveiling a wide range of colors and moods, especially in the bleak but graceful first movement where the cello’s drawn out lines blended with the more precise harmonies of the piano. In the ferocious Allegro, his intonation was astonishing, no matter how fast or difficult the bowing. With the balance between partners continually on display, and their mood easily transitioning between serious and playful, the poignant Largo gave way to a skillful and impassioned rendering of the dramatically intense finale.
After the complexity of the Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, a metaphor for limitless, offered a study in clarity and directness. With the hall lights turned down, the cello and piano conveyed all the poetry and purity of the score as a series of photos taken by the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes was projected onto a large screen suspended over the stage. The dazzling images – which Ma described as an example of the power of human collaboration and a suitable tribute to Isaac Stern – invoked a sense of the infinitude of the universe and intensified the emotional impact of Pärt’s stripped-down musical invention.
The program concluded with César Franck’s Violin Sonata, in Jules Delsart’s well-known arrangement for cello and piano. Ma’s clear and confident delivery combined with Stott’s superb handling of the challenging part for keyboard produced a glorious account, full of eloquence, grace and gravitas. The Recitativo-Fantasia third movement had marvelous repose and the other three were infused with fresh and natural exuberance and a sense of line that carried the listener through the work’s numerous changes in momentum and culminated in an appropriately celebratory finale.
