Feature | Yo-Yo Ma in Taipei Tonight: From Paris Child Prodigy to 19 Grammy Awards
Taipei — Cellist Yo-Yo Ma takes the stage at Taipei's National Concert Hall tonight (October 19) at 7:45 p.m. for the second performance of his Taiwan run. According to presenter MNA, his new special project "Wisdom for a Broken World" opened at the same hall on the afternoon of October 18, continues tonight, and closes on October 21 at the National Taichung Theater. He is joined by Canadian Indigenous tenor Jeremy Dutcher, pianist Yun Janice Lu, violinist Keila Wakao, and Taiwan's Paiwan singing group TBT Taiwu Ancient Ballads. The program includes Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor and a movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, running about 100 minutes; Taipei tickets were priced from NT$1,980 to NT$5,980.
Ma was born in Paris in 1955 to Chinese parents — his mother a singer, his father a violinist, composer and professor of music. He began the cello with his father at age four, gave his first recital at five, and moved with his family to New York at seven, later studying at the Juilliard School and earning a liberal-arts degree from Harvard University in 1976. As a boy he performed for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and appeared on American television in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. "Child prodigy" was his first label, but not his last.
What has defined Ma's career is his refusal to keep the cello inside the concert hall. His 1983 recording of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites won him his first Grammy Award the following year, and his discography kept crossing borders — Appalachian bluegrass, Argentine tango, Brazilian music and traditional Chinese melodies, as well as film scores including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His official biography credits him with more than 120 albums and 19 Grammy Awards, alongside the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the National Medal of Arts (2001), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010), the Kennedy Center Honors (2011) and the Polar Music Prize (2012). Named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2006, he has performed for nine American presidents.
In 1998 he founded Silkroad, bringing musicians from cultures along the ancient Silk Road onto one stage; in 2018 he launched the Bach Project, taking Bach's six suites around the world paired with community conversations. That thread — his conviction that culture connects us — runs through tonight's Taipei program, which begins from a single cello and weaves classical chamber music, Indigenous voices and imagery into a reflection on how people relate to nature, to the land and to one another. Placing Paiwan songs at the heart of a National Concert Hall program is the latest Taiwanese expression of that idea.
For Chinese-speaking audiences worldwide, Ma holds a particular place: a child of a Chinese family who reached the summit of Western classical music, then spent more than half a century carrying his instrument back out to people — from the White House and the United Nations to schools, communities and outdoor squares. After tonight's 7:45 p.m. performance in Taipei, one date remains on this Taiwan run, on October 21 in Taichung; ticket and waitlist information is available from presenter MNA. (By The Star)
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Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：马友友2019年在 Mexico City 演出「巴赫计划」后向观众致意（资料图）。Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México 摄，图片来源：Wikimedia Commons，CC BY 2.0。Photo: Yo-Yo Ma acknowledges the audience after a Bach Project performance in Mexico City in 2019 (file photo), by the Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
