At the end of the summer, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime collaborator, the pianist Emanuel Ax, performed a series of pop-up concerts for essential workers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The first of these took place in late August, in the farming town of Lee, in the Berkshires. Audience members stood inside carefully spaced hula hoops, in observance of social-distancing guidelines; in a pen behind the spectators, dairy cows mooed.
Unusual—and absent—audiences have been a feature of the past concert season. For their New Yorker Festival event, which was moderated by the magazine’s music critic, Alex Ross, Ma and Ax performed Beethoven’s soaring Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major from an empty auditorium at the Tanglewood Music Center, in Massachusetts. You can see excerpts of their performance, and their conversation with Ross, in the video above.
Both musicians were cannily aware of the parallels between our present moment and the history of the sonata. The piece, perhaps the most well-known of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas, could be understood as a deliberate attempt to counteract encroaching darkness with a bit of light. Beethoven wrote the sonata in 1808, when, anguished by Napoleon’s betrayal of the progressive ideals of the French Revolution, he “sent his patron a copy of the manuscript with the inscription, ‘amid tears and sorrow,’ ” Ax said. And yet, the sonata is “hopeful, beautiful, generous, noble—all of those things.”
The discussion occasionally evolved into a masterclass in music theory and interpretation, as Ma and Ax (“Yo-Yo” and “Manny”) highlighted the tension and release brought on by a particular motif of chords—a feature of Beethoven’s works—or illustrated their points with virtuosic snippets of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
In between movements, Ross asked both musicians how their performances had changed in response to the events of the recent months. Ma and Ax agreed that, in some ways, the imperative to play and perform had grown even stronger. “Our circumstances might change, our lives may change, but there’s something in music that remains constant,” Ma said. “We should always respond to need. That’s our first job.”
