![]() ![]() Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system. ![]() “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third. “Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.” “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. “The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.” Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War - the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War. After a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.īut rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. ![]()
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