\nThere’s good music, there’s great music, and then there’s music that transcends all attempts to describe it.
\nThis was one of the latter kind.\n<\/p>\n
\nI think that’s all I’m going to say about that.\n<\/p>\n
\nNot only did the music sound fabulous; we also got to see Yo-Yo Ma play it. We had good seats (row 2) so we could see his face and hands really well. Some of the music was technically very demanding and it was a pleasure to see him work.\n<\/p>\n
\nAccording to the programme leaflet, he plays “a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius”. Whichever one it was, it was a beautiful instrument to look at, with a red glow, and had a wonderful sound: melodious, soft, deep. I could have just listened to the sound of the cello, ignoring the music, and enjoyed that.\n<\/p>\n
\nOne man, one cello, up close – very intimate performance, despite the size of the hall.\n<\/p>\n
\nHe also turned out to be a very friendly, humble and good-humoured man. He appeared to be as grateful to the audience as we were to him. We managed to applaud three extra pieces out of him (which led to very pleased and humble gestures from him) and those were even better than Bach’s cello suites. One sounded decidedly Oriental (therefore probably from his Silk Road project<\/a>). Another may have been a modern arrangement of some folk tune – it sounded modern but I thought it had some elements of old dance music in it. I have no idea what the third one was, but it was the best moment of the whole concert. I’ll need to keep an eye out for reviews of this concert, they might mention what it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \nThere’s good music, there’s great music, and then there’s music that transcends all attempts to describe it.
\nThis was one of the latter kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art_entertainment","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19718,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/19718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}