Yo-Yo Ma Wows Audience in Rare Montana Performance at Wachholz College Center in Kalispell
The famed cellist received a standing ovation as soon as he walked out onto the stage at Flathead Valley Community College's world-class venue, which is earning a reputation for attracting top talent
By Mike Kordenbrock & Cathy Li
For Carol Sullivan, a retired ballet teacher and a Kalispell resident for more than 40 years, the Wachholz College Center has been a source of joy from the start.
She was there during the inaugural performance by the Wailin’ Jennys in November 2022, and again in December of the same year when, in a special familial aligning of the stars, her niece arrived in town as part of the San Diego Ballet Company’s traveling performance of “Nutcracker.” Since then she’s been to more events — a talk from Gary Trudeau, the creator of the “Doonesbury” comic strip, comes to mind as she cycles back through the various tickets she’s purchased over the center’s first two years.
But seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform at the center, in what’s believed to be his first Montana show in 20 years, was for Sullivan “the event of a lifetime.”
As she spoke, standing just outside the doors to McClaren Hall before Ma’s Aug. 3 show, Sullivan was surrounded by hundreds of concertgoers who had converged on the campus of Flathead Valley Community College to see the world famous cellist.
President Jane Karas said afterward that people exiting the show were “on cloud nine” and didn’t seem to want to leave.
“People are still talking about the impact, and I think a lot of that, unlike some of the other concerts, which have been great, is that Yo-Yo Ma really uses music to connect with people and bring community together,” Karas said a few days later. “And I think as a community college, part of our mission is to serve the needs of our community, meet the needs of our community, and bring the community together.”
Matt Laughlin, the director for the Wachholz Center, echoed Karas in saying that it seemed almost like people were floating after the show.
“It felt kind of like a grand opening,” Laughlin said. “Even though we’ve been open for a year-and-a-half. But it did … the whole evening from start to finish, had a different feel to it. There was a different buzz in the lobby.”
While Sullivan has been a local for most of her life, others, like James and Elizabeth Cleveland, made the drive up from Missoula. With their two young children in tow, the Clevelands said it was their first time at the Wachholz Center. Their live music diet of late has typically gone in another direction — Elizabeth mentioned the jam band Phish and the alternative rock band Primus — but they wanted to seize on the rare chance to see Ma perform relatively close to where they live, and to share the experience with their children.
James, a longtime fan of Ma’s, said that somewhere in the range of 20 or 25 years ago, while he was in Greenville, South Carolina, he missed a chance to see Ma perform live, and he’s never forgotten the disappointment. A year ago, when he first learned that Ma was performing in Kalispell, he was determined to get tickets. He set an alarm on his phone, and cranked the ringer’s volume all the way up.
It just so happened that the window to buy tickets opened up during a work meeting. As Cleveland recalled, after his alarm interrupted the meeting he started apologizing, and then explained that it was for Yo-Yo Ma tickets. When the person leading the meeting heard his explanation, she told Cleveland to get the tickets.
“Yo-Yo Ma tickets? Well, go ahead,” she said, according to Cleveland. He waited in the digital queue as the meeting continued. When he finally nabbed tickets, his coworkers cheered. As the Wachholz Center’s Laughlin noted, the run on tickets for Ma was the first time an entire show at the venue sold out in less than 15 minutes.
As showtime arrived and Ma walked onto the stage, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation before he had even settled into his chair. After the crowd quieted down, a smile flashed across his face and then his bow cascaded down to play the first note of “Simple Gifts” by American composer and songwriter Joseph Brackett.
“Simple Gifts” is usually the first piece played in Ma’s most recent project, “Our Common Nature,” an ongoing tour that takes Ma to all of America’s national parks. Ma describes this project as a “cultural journey, a celebration of the ways nature can reinvigorate the human experiment, reuniting us in pursuit of a common future.”
Venues for “Our Common Nature” have included The Grand Canyon, Acadia National Park, West Virginia’s Appalachians, and, prior to his Wachholz performance, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, where he played for an audience that included a herd of bison.
After concluding “Simple Gifts,” and receiving another round of applause, Ma described the impact performing to bison had on him before detailing his approach to this performance and, in so doing, setting the atmosphere for a night of musical storytelling. For the Wachholz, Ma told the audience he designed the performance program for “you and for no other place.”
Those selections had Ma, the winner of 19 Grammy Awards and a noted humanitarian, exercising his full range of talents, from his usual spritely, colorful solo cello arrangements to more contemplative, somber pieces, spanning across genres and composers, before closing out the performance with a haunting Catalan piece.
Ma’s interpretability, made possible through his sense of humor, skillful playing, knowledge and seemingly innate ability to connect with the audience, shined throughout the night. Before playing a cello sonata by composer George Crumb, whose pieces usually play off an advanced understanding of musical emotional depth, Ma told of how Crumb was just 27 when he wrote the piece four years after the end of World War I, and shortly after the Great Influenza epidemic had ended.
“For me, this piece, instead of nature and human nature, it’s more about the Industrial Revolution. Machine and humanity. So it’s that kind of combination. So let’s see if you like it.”
As he ventured deeper into Crumb’s thought-provoking piece Ma was able to shift seamlessly between moments of consonant and dissonant sound in a way that seemed to convey the melodrama and longing that can be found in the complicated and sometimes destructive relationship between man and nature.
The genre of classical music is often regarded to be formal, and sometimes inaccessible, but that was not the atmosphere for the night. Ma brought his sense of humor with him. He bantered with the audience, sending them into laughter at one point after declaring himself a “crappy cellist,” before praising the concert hall’s acoustics. The effect of that humor added a lightness and an earnest quality to his performance that balanced the line between taking his craft seriously, but not taking himself so seriously.
“He is very human,” Leslie Dillon, an audience member from Kalispell, said after the show. At 70, she has been following Ma’s musical career for 40 years now, ever since she saw him in an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.
“I like his music, but I also like him,” she said.
As the night progressed, Ma’s cello also brought to life pieces like fiddle player Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” Antonin Dvorak’s “Goin’ Home,” and “Honour Song,” a Ma collaboration with Jeremy Dutcher, a classically trained Canadian Indigenous tenor, composer and activist. Ma also managed to bring new moods to pieces like Hindemith’s Sonata for the cello, a typically brash, dark and chordal experience, by following it up later with Bach’s Suite No. 3, which tends to swing towards sunnier timbres.
After nearly 90 minutes of playing, Ma finally stepped off the stage, seemingly as a signal that the show had ended. The crowd again rose and the room roared with applause. Laughlin, the Wachholz Center director, later said it might have been the loudest applause McClaren Hall has seen to date.
After over a minute of clapping and cheering, Ma returned to the stage and signaled, with a smile, that he had one more song in him.
For the encore, Ma treated the audience to “Song of the Birds,” a piece by one of his figurative mentors, the 20th century cellist, humanitarian and exiled Catalan political activist Pablo Casals. In Catalan, the song’s original title is “El Cant Dels Ocells,” a folk song that Casals grew up listening to and that later became a symbol representing strength and peace. Casals, a huge supporter of Catalan autotomy, eventually fled his homeland and promised to only return if democracy was restored to Spain. From 1939 on he played this song at the beginning of every concert, but for Ma’s Kalispell show, it served as the cellist’s final word on the evening.
After the last note rang out, Ma held his bow silently across the cello’s strings, drawing out the quiet that had settled over the concert hall. Then he relaxed, dropping his bow to his side.
And the room, once again, exploded with applause.