Merci

At the heart of music’s most daring and inspiring performances lies great collaboration, built from a blend of trust and respect, as well as a knowledge that pushing and challenging perspectives will never threaten those bonds. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott have been performing together for 40 years, delighting audiences across the world, whether through live concerts or studio recordings. Merci, a rich, fertile collection of Romantic French music that runs deep with personal connections, marks the final chapter of their combined story. Its title (French for “Thank you”) speaks for itself. “Chamber music of any kind is like having a dialogue,” Kathryn Stott tells Apple Music Classical, “so you’re sort of listening, you are putting your opinion across without too much compromise, but you respect that the other person might have things to say.” For Yo-Yo Ma, that sense of each musician bringing their life and musical experience to the partnership is all important. “Kathy [Kathryn Stott] is always exploring something, whether it’s going off to Australia or Norway or wherever, and it’s interesting to follow her friendships and adventures, and all that comes with it,” he says. “Playing with her is like looking through her, examining her past in a way. As a duo, you are drawing from each other’s intuition bank, and it’s the investment in time and experiences that fill up that account. Musicians operate on instincts but also turn knowledge into instincts, or into intuition. And that gets richer with time.” So there couldn’t be a more perfect album than Merci in the way that it draws deeply on both of these artists’ early musical lives, way before they started playing together. Their recital features music by Gabriel Fauré alongside two pieces by one of his pupils, the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger, as well as works by contemporaneous composers including Boulanger’s sister Lili. All of them, from Pauline Viardot, who hosted the likes of Saint-Saëns and Fauré at her celebrated Parisian soirées, to Saint-Saëns himself, who introduced Fauré to Viardot and dedicated his opera Samson and Delilah to her, weave fascinating connections through the program. Both Ma and Stott have their own personal stakes in this history. While studying at the Menuhin School, the then 10-year-old Stott played Fauré’s Barcarolle No. 4 to Boulanger herself. “I was a little anxious about playing to her one-to-one, but actually she couldn’t have been sweeter. She was very much obsessed with the harmonic language—and that, I think, is the secret to Fauré in the end. He wrote amazing melodies, we know that from all the songs and everything else. But the harmonic language is really unique.” That early exposure to Fauré and to someone so intimately connected to the composer led, for Stott, to a lifetime’s love of his music, evident in her acclaimed 1995 Hyperion recording of the composer’s complete music for piano. Ma, meanwhile, enjoys different connections to Boulanger. “She actually lived half a mile away from my house in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the war,” he says. “She taught at the Longy School, was the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony, and the first woman to go to the New York Philharmonic. And she taught one of her best students, the pianist Luise Vosgerchian, who was my professor in college.” You can hear the deep affection that both Ma and Stott have for the music featured in Merci, including for Fauré’s deeply poignant Elegy whose funereal introduction opens up, like a waking flower, to a central section of utter loveliness. “All those string works by Fauré are unbelievably precious,” says Stott, “and there’s so much craftsmanship in each and every one. We were fairly fixed on Fauré being the kind of central character, but we played through an awful lot of music before we settled on the final program.” “Merci expresses a sense of gratitude in picking this music, and also in terms of the years that we’ve spent together,” adds Ma. “It’s not often expressed, but is definitely deeply felt, in terms of just making the songs such a pleasure.” “So,” replies Stott, “it’s very meaningful.”