Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist who reaches out beyond the core classical audience: he’s even worked with Torvill and Dean. For his first Wigmore Hall recital for 20 years, he performed with his regular pianist partner Kathryn Stott, and if most of what they played wasn’t conceived for cello and piano, they made it sound as if it should have been.
They opened with music from Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella, even more playfully sardonic than the orchestral version, Stott’s rhythmic flexibility matching Ma’s, while in Villa-Lobos’s Chôros No 5, the cello fed off the piano’s contemplative line. This initiated a Latin-American interlude: a Piazzolla tango was languidly melancholic, the cello briefly sounding concertina-like; while Camargo Guarnieri’s Dansa negra had something of the bar-room about it. Manuel de Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs gave Stott greater prominence but Ma stole the limelight, his cello at times evoking a flamenco singer’s exquisite heartbreak.
A trace of hesitancy in Ma’s playing gave the cello and piano movement from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time an unresolved feeling, which perhaps accounted for the audience silence that followed. No such problem with a Brahms Sonata, Ma’s rich, Romantic sound coming into its own with glorious exuberance.