Transcript Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma From http://web.mit.edu/jchang/www/ma2.html biography • Yo-Yo Ma gave his first public recital at age 5 and by the time he was 19 was being compared with such masters as Rostropovich and Casals. One of the most sought-after cellists of our time, Mr. Ma has appeared with eminent conductors and orchestras in all the music capitals of the world. He has also earned a distinguished international reputation as an ambassador for classical music and its vital role in society. • Highly acclaimed for his ensemble playing, Mr. Ma regularly performs chamber music with a wide circle of colleagues. Over the past several seasons, he has joined Emanuel Ax, Isaac Stem and Jaime Laredo for performances and recordings of the piano quartet repertoire, including works of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Fauré, Mozart and Schumann. Mr. Ma's long-standing partnership with Emanuel Ax is one of the music world's most successful collaborations. Together they regularly perform duo recitals and made many recordings, including the complete cello sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms as well as works of Britten, Chopin, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Strauss, among others. During the 199596 season, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of their partnership with a recital tour culminating at Carnegie Hall as well as a special concert at Alice Tully Hall for PBS's "Live from Lincoln Center." • Mr. Ma recently completed a collaborative project of a different kind, creating films of Bach's Six Cello Suites that explore the relationship between Bach's music and other artistic disciplines. The first of these, featuring original choreography of Mark Morris set to the Third Cello Suite, was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1995. Subsequent films are to incorporate the work of the renowned Kabuki artist Tamasaburo Bando, the Italian architect Piranesi, Boston-based garden designer Julie Moir Messervy, Olympic ice-dancing champions Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, and Canadian film director Atom Egoyan. • An exclusive Sony Classical recording artist, YoYo Ma is a ten-time Grammy award winner. Among his recent releases are Peter Lieberson's chamber work "King Gesar;" a disc of recent concertos by Kirchner, Rouse and Danielpour with David Zinman and the Philadelphia Orchestra; and a new work by Andre Previn, set to words by Toni Morrison, with soprano Sylvia McNair and Mr. Previn as pianist. This fall Sony Classical released "Appalachia Waltz," an album of original music recorded in Nashville with fiddle player Mark O'Connor and bassist Edgar Meyer. • Contemporary music, particularly by American composers, has for many years been an important part of Mr. Ma's repertoire. Over the past several seasons, he has premiered works by Stephen Albert, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour, David Diamond, John Harbison, Lou Harrison, Leon Kirchner, Ezra Laderman, Peter Lieberson, Tod Machover, Christopher Rouse, Bright Sheng and John Williams. • A very recent premiere of comtemporary music was Heaven, Earth, Mankind: Symphony 1997, celebrating the return of Hong Kong to Chinese Rule. Mr. Ma developed a very close relationship with composer Tan Dun and has recently given performances of the symphony around the world. • Alongside his extensive performing and recording, Yo-Yo Ma devotes time to work with young musicians in programs such as those at Interlochen and Tanglewood. He seeks to include educational outreach activities in his regular touring schedule as well, through master classes and more informal interaction with student audiences. He is also working to develop concerts for family audiences and appeared with Emanuel Ax on Camegie Hall's family series in 1995-96. • Bom in Paris in 1955 of Chinese parents, YoYo Ma began his cello studies with his father at age 4. Later, he studied with Janos Scholz and in 1962 he began his studies with Leonard Rose at The Juilliard School. A graduate of Harvard University, he was accorded the special distinction of an honorary doctorate in music in 1991 by his alma mater. He was also the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize in 1978. Mr. Ma and his wife, Jill, have two children, Nicholas and Emily. • He currently plays a Montagnana cello from Venice made in 1733 and a Davidoff Stradivarius made in 1712. from the Washington Post Yo-Yo Ma: Simply the Best • By Tim Page Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, January 25, 1999; Page C01 • Only an artist with the charm, charisma and celebrity of Yo-Yo Ma could have sold out the Kennedy Center Concert Hall -- down to the last stage seat -- for a program so defiantly uncompromising as the one the cellist played there late Saturday afternoon. Yet Ma, who is also a musician of the most profound and serious order, not only kept audience members in their seats throughout the challenging concert (with virtually no attrition after intermission), he also left them cheering at the end. • Concerts for solo stringed instruments (the piano, of course, excluded) are never easy, for either performer or listener. By necessity, even the most extraordinary violinist, violist or cellist has to contend with the intrinsic difficulties of the chosen instrument -- not only the natural limitation of harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities but also a certain timbral sameness. Even the greatest works for solo strings -- the sonatas and partitas for violin and the suites for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach -- do not make for easy listening; we must immerse ourselves in their majesty if we are to take anything home with us. • On Saturday Ma had the splendid audacity to play works only by 20th-century composers, three of them still living. • The program began with a piece by country music fiddler Mark O'Connor, "Appalachia Waltz," a plaintive, quietly suggestive melody that might have emanated from a Walker Evans photograph. Ma played this haunting miniature in a plush half voice that made it all the more affecting. • Bright Sheng's "Seven Tunes Heard in China" immediately followed, providing a mixture of folk melody, meditation and musical experimentation. • The fourth in the series, "The Drunken Fisherman," called for Ma to pluck and strum his strings repeatedly; in an amusing introduction, the cellist explained the method, in which he discovered that the computerized plastic cards that many hotels now offer in lieu of traditional room keys made the perfect pick. Although the "Seven Tunes" were not consistently compelling, the best of them were lively indeed, and the "Tibetan Dance" called for Ma to rap his knuckles upon his instrument on several occasions, endowing the music with a percussive, tablalike beat. • David Wilde's "The Cellist of Sarajevo," described as "a lament in rondo form," proved a searching, eloquent work built in a long arch -- from silence it came and to silence it returned, after a brief, desperately impassioned reverie. • But the unquestioned highlight of the concert was Ma's magnificent reading of the great Sonata for Solo Cello (Op. 8) by the late Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly. Wrenching, exhaustive and exhilarating, this 35-minute work must be counted among the most jagged and precipitous Himalayas in the cello repertory. • In Ma's hands, the sonata unfolded with the direct inevitability of an ancient epic, its considerable knots and dissonances only part of an endlessly absorbing narrative. • Before the program, Douglas H. Wheeler, the president of the Washington Performing Arts Society, which produced this event, mentioned that Ma had played four concerts for the organization within the past 14 months; moreover, the cellist spent much of Friday working with local youngsters.