By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 18, 2024 performance – The penultimate Sunday matinee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 season at Tanglewood featured celebrated Berkshires homeboy Yo-Yo Ma taking his annual star turn on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage, as soloist for a performance of Robert Schumann’s Cello concerto in A minor, Opus 129.
It made for a particularly touching moment, when departing BSO assistant conductor Earl Lee told the audience the role Mr. Ma played in his early musical development. As a boy in southern South Korea, after telling his parents he would like to play cello, he was given a laser disc titled Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood!
That is the sort of remark welcome from the stage at the start of a concert. It demonstrates the essential continuity of the arts, of culture. The musicians of tomorrow will have been trained and inspired by the musicians of today. When kept brief and to the point as today, there is no chance for the audience to be diverted from their purpose in attending a concert of music.
Artists of the order of Yo-Yo Ma, and earlier soloists this season, are born with such gifts that even if music weren’t available, they’d find an avenue of expression elsewhere. Having attended the master class he gave in Ozawa Hall a few years ago, we know how wonderful a teacher he is; when he performs, he is so eloquent in gesture that the lost art of pantomime also is within his ken.
Maestro Lee, music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, elicited a rousing performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony to conclude the concert, and release us back to fraught reality, at least until we’re re-launched, one more time next week, by Beethoven’s Ninth!