Photograph by Jason Bell
Yo-Yo Ma, the preeminent celloist of our time, was in Stamford in late May to perform with Orchestra Lumos under the direction of Conductor Michael Stern. Formerly the Stamford Symphony, Orchestra Lumos is the leading professional orchestra in Fairfield County.
The program for Friday and Saturday, May 24 and 25, included works by Sibelius, Haydn and Dvořák in celebrating “Our Common World”—a project and a concept “very close to his heart,” Stern says of Ma. “He believes in music as a way to bring people not only together, but also around shared ideas and values. Certainly, our connection to nature and to the world around us is more essential and urgent now than ever before!”
Anytime Yo-Yo Ma performs is a thrilling experience, and Saturday’s performance was no exception.
“Nobody radiates from the stage the joy of communication and connection that music can bring as he does,” says Stern, Orchestra Lumos’ Musical Director. “He is who he is for a reason—he is really almost one-of-a-kind—because he transcends the physical act of playing an instrument to a much more elemental level of human communication.”
The range of Yo-Yo Ma’s performances, collaborations and recognitions is breath-taking.
He has performed for nine American presidents, including Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower when he was seven, and has demonstrated his belief in the power of music to transcend genres and cultures by playing with musicians as diverse as James Taylor, Miley Cyrus, Sting, Santana, Bobby McFerrin and the Nashville-based banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck. He has won multiple Grammies, a National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Nearly as important as his standing on the world stage as a celloist, Yo-Yo Ma is an international ambassador of peace and understanding through music. He is a United Nations’ Messenger of Peace, in fact, and the first artist ever appointed to the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees.
That Ma was in Stamford—for the first time—was due in large part to his lifelong friendship with Michael Stern.
In 1962, Dr. Hiao-Tsjun Ma and his wife arrived in New York from Paris with their two young children in the hopes of his teaching music at a small, bilingual school in Manhattan. In perfect French, Dr. Ma declared he could teach any student to learn to play a stringed instrument. To assess the man’s credentials, the school’s headmaster asked Isaac Stern, the famed violinist, who with his wife had helped found the school in which their three children, including Michael, were enrolled, to meet with the family. In the Sterns’ apartment, Dr. Ma explained that if he could teach his own children, he could teach any child. He introduced his daughter, Hiao-Tsiun, 11, a violinist and musical prodigy.
“And then he introduced his seven-year-old son,” Stern says, “who played the cello beyond anything that you can imagine a seven-year-old would be able to do. It was his (the father’s) way of saying, ‘Listen to my children—if I taught them, I can teach other kids!’”
Stern was three-and-a-half years old at the time and already a promising violinist. Despite the age difference, he and Ma became friends and have remained so, performing and collaborating together, ever since.
The first-half of Saturday’s gala performance featured “Les Elémens,” or “The Elements,” by Jean-Féry Rebel, and Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, about the composer’s response to observing swans in flight, which Stern calls “one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.”
Following intermission, Ma joined Orchestra Lumos for a performance of Dvořák’s “Silent Woods,” a meditation on being in nature, and Haydn’s Cello Concerto No.1, illustrating, in Stern’s words, “a kind of magical order that exists in the world into which nature and human beings can find common ground.”
Such is the drawing power of the cellist that the sold-out, two-day series saw over 3,000 concert-goers, half of them first-time attendees.
For Stern, Yo-Yo Ma exemplifies what it means to be a responsible citizen and leader in today’s world. “There could be no better musical partner,” he says, “to enliven this extraordinary program highlighting the profound relationship between humanity and the natural world.”
To learn more, visit orchestralumos.org.