The Night We Met Yo-Yo Ma

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The Night We Met Yo-Yo Ma

      While writing the post last week about cellist Sara Swain, who took up Yo-Yo Ma's #Songs of Comfort challenge (See post from 6/4/2020, "A Couple Points of Light, Part 2: #Songs of Comfort by Sara Swain), I was reminded of the time my daughters Maria and Claire and I met Yo-Yo Ma.
      My four children studied strings from a young age, the girls cello, my son violin (his choice; since his two older sisters played the cello he picked up the notion that cellos were for girls).
        Here they are performing together at a party in the summer of 1993,

...and here at Nordstroms around Christmas time in 2001, the last time all four performed publicly together,

...though they still goofed off together when the opportunity arose,

...and they did play at each others' weddings.

     According to the date on the the photographs I took, it was January 19, 1994 that Maria, Claire and I met master cellist and United Nations Messenger of Peace, Yo-Yo Ma (here in a more recent picture than when we met him),

...and world-renowned pianist Peter Serkin (also in a more recent picture),

...after a concert the two musicians played together that evening at the Ohio Theater in Columbus.
      It was my daughters' cello teacher who'd impressed upon them that, as young cellists themselves, seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform would be an inspiration, and added the incentive that if we went to the concert she'd arrange for us to meet him afterwards. "He's really a regular Joe," said their teacher of the most celebrated cellist in the world.
       And so I got our tickets for the Yo-Yo Ma/Peter Serkin concert, which we awaited with anticipation. 
        As it turned out, the concert almost didn't happen. On the day of the concert there was a storm of snow and sleet, and by evening the streets were treacherous.  However the concert wasn't cancelled, and I decided to make the drive downtown to the Ohio Theater, oh so slowly and carefully.
        We arrived to a less than half-full theater, and shortly before the performance was scheduled to begin it was announced that the concert would be delayed, as the musicians' plane had been delayed due to the weather.
        So we waited, though I don't remember how long. I think the delay might have been an hour or so. But the musicians finally arrived on stage - dressed in their traveling clothes. Apparently their luggage had been lost along the way. At the beginning of the performance a smiling Yo-Yo Ma said, "Welcome, everyone, to the first of the Casual Concert Series."
      The girls' cello teacher later remarked that it's likely that a different pair of celebrities might have insisted that they must have their formal performance attire and held up the concert even longer while assistants scrabbled around Columbus trying to round up tuxedos. But, thankfully, Yo-Yo Ma and Peter Serkin didn't feel the need to belabor this detail.
      The concert was wonderful, and to us it felt all the more special and intimate to see the famous musicians playing in their everyday clothes. The encore was an exciting surprise as Yo-Yo Ma and his accompanist played a cello piece that Maria and Claire had played (and Theresa would eventually play), the Bach Allegro Moderato. 

    Yo-Yo Ma, however, added some of his own beautiful ornamentation to the piece, and Peter Serkin played a more scintillating piano accompaniment than I, my children's accompanist, ever did.  My daughters' teacher told us that Yo-Yo Ma was known for sometimes performing student-level pieces so that some of the cello students in the audience might recognize a piece they played.
     After the concert we met up with the girls' cello teacher at the arranged rendez-vous point near the front of the theater. The teacher then took us to a clandestine elevator that went to a level beneath the theater  where there were dressing and waiting rooms for the performers. Years later when my youngest daughter Theresa was a member of the Columbus Children's Choir she and the other choir members and I and the other choir parents would spend considerable time in that same waiting area.  

    But that night was my first time backstage. Or rather, beneath stage.
   We waited with the teacher among the other people there to see the performers. When Yo-Yo Ma and Peter Serkin entered the area Yo-Yo Ma was set upon by a group of young people, evidently ardently admiring fans, who surrounded him for photos and autographs.

     As the path to Peter Serkin was clearer, we approached him for a picture, with which he graciously obliged us.

     It seemed pretty clear that we wouldn't be able to get close to Yo-Yo Ma, who was still surrounded, so we just stood off at a small distance and watched him smile and joke with the crowd around him.

    However at one point he looked beyond the crowd over to us standing by ourselves. He called us over. "Would you like to take a photo?" he asked. We sure did. In fact we took a couple.

         Claire, who had brought her cello repertory book, then asked him if he would autograph it. He opened it to the first song - which happened to be one of the movements of the Seitz Concerto - and at the top of the page drew a little elephant head with a cartoon bubble coming from its trunk saying, "Good job!"
         Sadly, that book - Suzuki Cello Volume 4 - was lost in the shuffle somewhere, I think it was  during a music workshop the girls attended that summer, and had to be replaced with a new one, unsigned by Yo-Yo Ma.
         The following year the girls began studying with a new teacher, Bin,

...who, it turned out, had studied with Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood.
      Small world.