Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott on stage at the Barbican on Nov 2 2024 – Mark Allan

In his almost 60-year career, Yo-Yo Ma has clocked up many “firsts”. The American is the only cellist to have played all six of Bach’s cello suites at the Hollywood Bowl, holding thousands of people spellbound. He’s the only classical performer to have appeared in an Apple commercial; he once graced an episode of The Simpsons. He has played with Metallica and Ennio Morricone and Sting and Diana Krall; he has performed for presidents and royalty.

So you might imagine that when Ma appeared last night at the Barbican with Kathryn Stott, his duet partner of 40 years, he would hog the limelight. Not a bit of it. Although this was billed as the last time they might play live together – Stott is retiring from the concert platform – Ma clearly thought of the evening as a tribute to her. They’re amusingly different in temperament: she punctures his on-stage flights of fancy with a bit of Manchester sarcasm, something he enjoys. Ma wanted us to applaud Stott, not him, and insisted the evening’s programme was “all her idea”.

It was indeed a nicely contrived programme, which saluted the music that has meant most to them over the years: the charm of Brazilian composer Sérgio Assad, the nostalgia of Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, and above all the music of French composers Gabriel Fauré and Nadia Boulanger (which has a personal connection to them both, through one great French teacher they shared). Alongside these bonbons were two big works: Shostakovich’s early, surprisingly lyrical Cello Sonata in D minor, and César Franck’s yearningly romantic Violin Sonata (in an arrangement for cello).

Ma and Stott had that wonderful freedom that comes when two performers know each other’s foibles as well as they do their strengths. Stott knows that Ma likes to wring the maximum intensity from an expressive moment – which he did, as ever, and just occasionally it seemed a bit much. But the co-ordination between the two at those moments when Ma lingered over Franck’s top notes was so instinctive and subtle that you couldn’t help warming to it. Ma in turn understood that Stott needed space as well as time, in the finger-twisting complications of the second movement. The music’s perfume, redolent equally of the organ-loft and the boudoir, came over with intensity.

There were many other moments to savour, such as the deliciously sweet major-key melody that breaks like sunlight into the first movement of Shostakovich’s sonata. Here, Ma and Stott pulled back the tempo back to a degree some might say was indulgent, but to me felt exactly right. There was the sheer wildness of the finale, which came as such a shock after the cheerful insouciance of the opening. (Ma is especially good at cheerful insouciance.) There was the elfin dancing of Fauré’s Papillon (Butterfly), and the almost-whispered charm of Dvořák.

Most spellbinding of all, though, were the slowly wheeling star-shapes of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel in Spiegel (Mirror within a Mirror). Here Stott made the unvarying tread seem both perfectly regular and tending towards stillness, as if eternity were folding the music into its embrace. Ma’s long notes were lovely, but his applause for Stott told us he knew it was her who really nailed the piece – and we knew it, too. IH

No further performances

Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson perform at the South Bank Centre – Pete Woodhead

Bringing the world’s two most in-demand classical pianists together for a duet recital tour (and eventually a recording) was a brilliant but also mischievous idea, born, one suspects in the brain of some canny recording executive. They seem so perfectly unmatched it would be like mixing two combustible chemicals and standing back to watch the fireworks.

The flamboyant Yuja Wang, as famous for her Louboutin heels and short skirts as for her pianism, made her break into stardom well before Víkingur Ólafsson, despite being three years younger than him. While the bespectacled, neatly confident Icelander was a penniless student in New York, the Chinese-born Wang had already won a string of prizes and undertaken her first triumphal tours.

As for their pianistic styles, it really is a case of chalk and cheese. Wang has become famous for the easy way that she tosses off titanically difficult concertos by Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, energy and grace perfectly in balance. Ólafsson shot to fame through the uncanny delicacy and clarity he brought to Baroque music, particularly the tenderly evocative character pieces of Rameau. They were the perfect antitheses: extrovert and introvert, yin and yang.

But which way round? The moment they started to play last night the neat antitheses fell away. Wang showed us in numerous passages in Schubert’s well-known Fantasia in F that she can make a sound as delicately far-away as Ólafsson’s. In Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, Ólafsson showed a steely yet joyous virtuosity that was positively Yuja-like in its flamboyance.

Another quality that kept our appetite keen for two and a half hours was the ingenious programme. It began with the tiny regretful falling phrases of Luciano Berio’s Wasserklavier (Water Keyboard) from 1984, sounding like bits of half-remembered romantic music, which faded without pause into Schubert’s Fantasia. Later came the witty rhythmic dislocations of an arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 6 for player piano, where these two human performers brilliantly evoked the machine’s attempt to be engagingly human. We had surprisingly old-fashioned melodic charm from that master of musical anarchy John Cage, and a gentle kaleidoscope of harmonies wheeling around a fixed tolling note from Arvo Pärt. Then came the magnificently sustained hammering of John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction, sounding as if joyous hymn-singing had somehow been crossed with bellringing.

All this was brilliantly conjured by the two pianists, though the best playing came in the final piece, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, where the sinister dance-of-death of the second movement shone out with jet-black glamour. It deservedly brought the house down, as did the six encores that followed. So why not five stars? Because although Wang and Ólafsson shone in music that was somehow strange and “marginal”, the deep pathos of Schubert’s Fantasia – which ought to have been the evening’s heart – somehow eluded them. Admittedly Schubert’s piece may have suffered from being in such odd musical company. One thing is for sure; as a display of pianistic mastery, from two artists at the top of their game, this concert was utterly spellbinding