Yo-Yo Ma marks triumphant return to Toronto as TSO celebrates centennial anniversary with style

It felt like an exhilarating homecoming for Yo-Yo Ma on Wednesday evening as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra celebrated its centennial anniversary — the sold-out crowd at Roy Thomson Hall showering the American cellist with an unrelenting wall of applause following his impassioned performance of Antonin Dvorak’s “Cello Concerto in B Minor.”

After what felt like a five-minute standing ovation, Ma — seemingly not expecting to play an encore — finally gave in, borrowing the instrument of TSO principal cellist Joseph Johnson to play a wistful solo as the audience and orchestra watched in silent rapture.

Ma, 67, is beloved no matter where he performs, be it in the hallowed concert halls of Europe or a crowded subway station in Montreal. But there’s always something special about his playing with the TSO.

He has a long history with the city; Ma made his TSO debut in 1979, back when the orchestra’s home was Massey Hall. In the four decades since, he has frequently returned as a soloist. He also helped design Toronto’s Music Garden along the lakeshore, which opened in 1999, and premiered his documentary “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.

Ma even acknowledged that Toronto feels “almost like a second home, a city of memories and connections around every corner.”

So it feels wholly appropriate that it was Ma who ushered the TSO into its second century of operations at the orchestra’s special gala concert earlier this week, in a program that also featured Indigenous vocalist Jeremy Dutcher and a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.”

Ma demonstrated his effortless technique in the Dvorak concerto, pouring every ounce of emotion into his instrument and producing a sound that was both warm and thunderously brilliant. He deftly navigated the melancholic lyricism in the middle of the piece, as well as the spry marchlike melody that is introduced in the first movement and repeated in the third.

Behind him, the orchestra, under the assured direction of conductor Gustavo Gimeno, offered a robust accompaniment, highlighting the majestic vibrancy in the orchestral introduction preceding Ma’s entrance.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the orchestra’s somewhat unenthusiastic interpretation of “Symphonic Dances.” A few missed notes and some directionless phrasing in the second and third sections, “Somewhere” and the scherzo, rendered the two most tender parts of the piece heavy and pedantic. It wasn’t until the fourth section, the finger-snapping and toe-tapping “Mambo,” that the music was injected with some vitality, which carried through to the finale.

The special gala concert opened, appropriately, with a Canadian composition by the late Oskar Morawetz. “Carnival Overture,” his earliest surviving work, is deeply expressive, popping with sweeping themes that were warmly accentuated by the orchestra.

Opening the second half was George Paul’s “Honour Song,” a rousing anthem originally written in the Mi’kmaq language. Dutcher, a Wolastoqiyik member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick (neighbouring Paul’s Red Bank Indian Reserve), has adapted the piece, with orchestrations by Owen Pallett. The result, with Ma on the cello accompanying his good friend Dutcher, was a powerful call to gather: the perfect message as audiences return to the concert hall and the TSO embarks on its next 100 years.