An A-lister line-up proves a mixed bag on this anniversary celebration

Yo-Yo Ma: Shostakovich

The Strad Issue: June 2025

Description: An A-lister line-up proves a mixed bag on this anniversary celebration

Musicians: Yo-Yo Ma (cello) Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons

Works: Shostakovich: Cello Concertos nos.1 and 2

Catalogue number: DG 4866949

The decades of experience Yo-Yo Ma brings to this music tells from the outset in the offhand, almost downbeat start to the First Concerto, all the better to build a dramatic arc for the solo part as a protagonist in a struggle with and often against the orchestra. Each phrase and every note of the slow movement counts for something, but Ma keeps the rhetoric of the long cadenza on a taut leash, so that its accumulated tension spills cathartically over into the finale. One or two tiny losses of coordination are the price paid for the intensity of a live recording.

The album could be enthusiastically recommended on that basis, but the drawback of the recording extends to a perspective that probably gives a decent reproduction of a seat from a few rows back in the stalls. At home, however, it’s hard to find a volume level that brings the soloist into focus without congesting the orchestral support. The Boston SO musicians have this music in their bloodstream, but the playing and direction hardly rises above the generically stylish and musical.

Compare the mournful opening of the Second Concerto with the new Decca studio version – Sheku Kanneh-Mason and the Sinfonia of London under John Wilson – and there’s a marked gain in immediacy and rapport between soloist and orchestra. While Ma brings off the Spanish flavour of the finale’s opening with heroic élan, the subsequent cello–flute duet lacks the definition, sensitivity and precision of the Decca version. Ma has never recorded the Second Concerto before, and this feels like a missed opportunity.

PETER QUANTRILL