For Carol Sullivan, a retired ballet teacher and Kalispell resident for more than 40 years, the Wachholz College Center has been a source of joy from the beginning.
She attended the inaugural performance of the Wailin’ Jennys in November 2022, and again in December of that year when her niece came to town as part of a special family alignment as part of the San Diego Ballet Company’s traveling performance of “The Nutcracker.” Since then, she’s attended more events – a talk by Gary Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” springs to mind as she goes through the various tickets she purchased during the center’s first two years.
But seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform at the center – likely his first show in Montana in 20 years – was “the event of a lifetime” for Sullivan.
As she stood and spoke just outside the doors of McClaren Hall before Ma’s show on August 3, Sullivan was surrounded by hundreds of concertgoers who had gathered on the campus of Flathead Valley Community College to see the world-famous cellist.
President Jane Karas said afterwards that people were “in seventh heaven” after the show and didn’t want to leave.
“People still talk about the impact, and I think that unlike some of the other concerts that have been great, a lot of it is Yo-Yo Ma really using music to connect with people and bring the community together,” Karas said a few days later. “And I think as a community college, part of our mission is to meet the needs of our community, meet the needs of our community and bring the community together.”
Matt Laughlin, director of the Wachholz Center, echoed Karas’ statement that after the show, people almost felt like they were floating.
“It felt like a grand opening,” Laughlin said. “Even though we’ve been open for a year and a half. But it was … the whole evening from start to finish had a different vibe. There was a different vibe in the lobby.”
While Sullivan has lived here most of her life, others, like James and Elizabeth Cleveland, have made the drive from Missoula. With their two young children in tow, the Clevelands said it was their first visit to the Wachholz Center. Their live music consumption of late has usually gone in a different direction – Elizabeth mentioned jam band Phish and alternative rock band Primus – but they wanted to take advantage of the rare opportunity to see Ma perform relatively close to home and share the experience with their children.
James, a longtime fan of Ma, said he missed the chance to see Ma perform live about 20 or 25 years ago when he was in Greenville, South Carolina, and he’s never forgotten the disappointment. When he first learned Ma would be performing in Kalispell a year ago, he was determined to get tickets. He set an alarm on his phone and turned the ringer volume up full.
Coincidentally, the window to purchase tickets opened during a work meeting. As Cleveland recalled, after his alarm interrupted the meeting, he began to apologize and then explained that it was about Yo-Yo Ma tickets. When the person running the meeting heard his explanation, he told Cleveland to get the tickets.
“Yo-Yo Ma tickets? Well, let’s go,” she said, according to Cleveland. He waited in the digital queue as the meeting continued. When he finally grabbed tickets, his colleagues cheered. As Laughlin of the Wachholz Center noted, the rush for tickets to Ma marked the first time an entire show at the venue had sold out in less than 15 minutes.
When the show began and Ma took the stage, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation before he even sat down in his chair. After the crowd quieted down, a smile crossed his face and then his bow lowered 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 latest project, “Our Common Nature,” an ongoing tour that takes Ma through 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 and reunite us in pursuit of a common future.””
Venues for “Our Common Nature” included the Grand Canyon, Acadia National Park, the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia and, before his Wachholz appearance, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, where he played to an audience that included a herd of bison.
After completing “Simple Gifts” and receiving another round of applause, Ma described the impact his performance before Bisons had on him before detailing his approach to the performance, setting the tone for an evening of musical storytelling. For the Wachholz, Ma told the audience he had designed the performance program “for you and for no other place.”
On these pieces, Ma, winner of 19 Grammy Awards and a well-known humanitarian, showed the full range of his talent, from his usual lively, colorful arrangements for cello solo to more thoughtful, somber pieces that spanned various genres and composers before closing the performance with a haunting Catalan piece.
Ma’s interpretability, enabled by his sense of humor, skillful playing, knowledge and seemingly innate ability to connect with the audience, shone throughout the evening. Before playing a cello sonata by composer George Crumb, whose pieces usually exude a keen understanding of musical emotional depth, Ma recounted that Crumb was only 27 when he wrote the piece, four years after the end of World War I and shortly after the end of the great flu epidemic.
“For me, this piece is not about nature and human nature, but about the industrial revolution. Machine and humanity. So it’s kind of a combination. Let’s see if you like it.”
As he delved deeper into Crumb’s thought-provoking piece, Ma managed to move seamlessly between moments of consonant and dissonant sounds, conveying the melodrama and longing found in the complicated and sometimes destructive relationship between man and nature.
The genre of classical music is often seen as formal and sometimes inaccessible, but that was not the atmosphere of the evening. Ma brought his sense of humor. He joked with the audience, at one point making them laugh when he called himself a “bad cellist” before praising the concert hall’s acoustics. The effect of this humor lent his performance a lightness and seriousness that balanced the line between the seriousness of his craft and self-abasement.
“He’s very human,” said Leslie Dillion, a viewer from Kalispell, after the show. At 70, she has followed Ma’s musical career for 40 years, ever since she saw him perform on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
“I like his music, but I also like him,” she said.
As the evening progressed, Ma’s cello also brought to life pieces such as violinist Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” Antonin Dvorak’s “Goin’ Home,” and “Honour Song,” a collaboration between Ma and Jeremy Dutcher, a classically trained Canadian Indigenous tenor, composer, and activist. Ma also managed to bring a new mood to pieces such as Hindemith’s Sonata for Cello, a typically bold, dark, and chordal experience, later playing Bach’s Suite No. 3, which tends toward sunnier timbres.
After nearly 90 minutes of playing, Ma finally left the stage, apparently signaling that the show was over. The crowd rose to its feet again and the hall erupted in thunderous applause. Laughlin, the director of the Wachholz Center, later said it was possibly the loudest applause McClaren Hall had ever seen.
After more than a minute of clapping and cheering, Ma returned to the stage and smiled, signaling that he still had one song left in him.
As an encore, Ma played “Song of the Birds” by one of his figurative mentors, the 20th century Chinese painter.th 19th-century cellist, humanist 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 with and that later became a symbol of strength and peace. A great supporter of Catalan autonomy, Casals eventually fled his homeland, promising to return only if democracy was restored in Spain. Starting in 1939, he played this song at the beginning of every concert, but at Ma’s show in Kalispell, it served as the cellist’s closing words for the evening.
After the last note sounded, Ma held his bow silently over the cello strings, allowing the silence that had fallen over the concert hall to linger a little longer. Then he relaxed and let the bow fall beside him.
And the hall burst into applause again.
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