Of all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s many, many collaborations, the one with the pianist Kathryn Stott has been among his most enduring.
Ma and Stott have been giving recitals and making records for 40 years. But time passes on, and as Stott, 65, prepares to retire from public performances at the end of this year, they have marked the passing of their partnership with a tour and a last album, “Merci” — a beautiful and poignant adieu through music by Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Lili and Nadia Boulanger.
Friends before they started playing together, Ma and Stott met in 1978 in rather unusual circumstances. Ma and his wife, Jill, were staying in London, where they sublet an apartment in Hampstead. “One especially hot day I was practicing — with almost no clothes on — when two people unexpectedly walked into the flat,” Ma, 69, has said. “It turned out that our landlord had failed to mention that he had a flatmate or to tell her that he had sublet his room! The flatmate was Kathy Stott. And that’s how a beautiful friendship began.”
Speaking from Berlin recently, Ma and Stott discussed their new recording, the notion of lineage in music and their time together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Kathy, this album seems to have several different layers to it.
KATHRYN STOTT It really does. One of my all-time favorite composers is Fauré. It’s 100 years since he died. I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but you know, what can you do? So that was one little idea. And then Yo-Yo and I both have connections to Nadia Boulanger, so we were thinking also about our heritage, our teachers and all the links of the composers on the album. Every single composer on there is linked through a story, or being a teacher, or being introduced to another. And then our kind of “merci” to each other for these remarkable 40 years that we’ve had, being musical explorers and otherwise.
YO-YO MA Kathy was the architect of the pieces and the linkages, and my contribution was the one word.
STOTT Merci!
MA For me, “merci” is not just “thank you,” but gratitude comes to mind. Maybe it’s my late age, but there’s a lot that I think we are grateful for. As I get older, I start to remember things that people said to me that early on just went in one ear and out the other, but then upon reflection, I realized that, wow, people really cared, or what they said really had much deeper meaning than I attributed to it at that time.
As Kathy started creating this album and talked about the linkages to Fauré, I would start remembering the way people talked in my childhood in France, about how deep his late trio was, and how difficult it was. This great concert that they played [in Fauré’s honor] at the Sorbonne [in 1922]. I literally lived half a block from the Sorbonne; I would hear the clock chime every quarter-hour. I realized that in 1924, when he died, my father was 13 years old. All of these things come together. Little pieces I knew of, because my great music teacher at Harvard was Nadia Boulanger’s student, Luise Vosgerchian, and she was the person that turned me from a neurotic musician into an even more neurotic musician. No, to a less neurotic musician ——
STOTT [Laughing] We’re still waiting.
MA And so I owe [Vosgerchian] my life of musical exploration. She came to my house in Cambridge, and she said, “I know this house.” I said, “What do you mean, Luise?” She says, “I know this house because we used to have the memorial Lili Boulanger meetings in this house when Nadia Boulanger taught at the Longy School during the war.” So, these are completely nonsense connections, but they’re incredibly meaningful.
STOTT I think that runs throughout the whole album. Not just music, but we have stories that we relate to. I played to Nadia Boulanger as a young girl of 10 years old, and she was the student of Fauré, and Saint-Saëns was the teacher of Fauré, and Pauline Viardot introduced Fauré into society, so there’s great links with all of us. I say to my students now, “You are actually linked to all this.” It’s an endless story.
MA You want to make history come alive, right? So you ask about Nadia to Luise, and I have little snippets of information. You tell me little snippets of information. I go on YouTube and watch the couple of documentaries that they’ve made on her. I read a number of books on her. So now I have some kind of picture that I put together, and I realize that, my goodness, a lot of things that Luise told me actually came from Nadia.
STOTT All these little things seep into the music that then happens to be recorded. On another level, all of that has to just work without people delving into it all.
One of the messages I took from the album was that the Paris of the late-19th and early-20th centuries provided an atmosphere in which women could write exceptional music.
STOTT I think every piece on there is a gem of some sort or another. They were such strong women, really important in their own individual way. Somebody asked us an interesting question the other day, saying did we think Nadia and Lili’s music was similar because they were sisters, and I don’t think they are at all, not really. It was a curious thing, but I hadn’t articulated it to myself, but I think that they both were unbelievable. I mean, that “La Mer” song [by Nadia Boulanger] is just to die for, isn’t it? I think I’d have to put it right up there.
MA And “Cantique.”
What made you decide to start playing together?
STOTT I didn’t decide; his wife did.
MA [Laughing] She wanted to get me out of the house.
STOTT Seriously, it was Jill’s idea. I played a lot of chamber music. I’d grown up with it at the Menuhin School, and I’d always loved the cello. I seemed to play more with the cello than with any other instrument. I think Jill was aware of that. It was all her idea, so we can thank her or blame her, whatever day it is.
MA I like to think that we were friends ——
STOTT Yes, we were.
MA Long before we started playing together, and what’s so nice is that we’re going to always be friends whether we play music or not. The chemistry is crucial in any kind of partnership, right? And I think the chemistry was always there.
STOTT Now it seems bizarre, but really neither of us knew the other. And even when I knew what your name was, I didn’t know who you were. I can remember driving to a concert in my very beaten-up car. I was 19, and there was smoke coming out of the back of the car, it really didn’t work at all. I remember getting to the concert and thinking, “Oh, he’s not bad, that cellist.” It was a great place to start, because it was much better than coming in 30 years later.
What are the most important things you have learned from each other?
MA Character, integrity, values.
STOTT Am I allowed to say the same? But I will add humor, courage, exploration — not being afraid to explore.
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