Episode Details

In the fall of 1999, a passenger stepped out of a New York taxi and left a 1733 Montagnana cello worth about two and a half million dollars in the trunk. The passenger was Yo-Yo Ma, and the cello, nicknamed Petunia, was recovered unharmed. This deep dive uses that very human moment as a window into a life that runs from a three-year-old in Paris demanding to play the double bass to a United Nations Messenger of Peace who has played for grieving cities and for the stars.

We follow his early performances for Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower at age seven, his television introduction by Leonard Bernstein at eight, and his surprising pivot from Juilliard to a Harvard anthropology degree in 1976, which reframed the cello as a passport rather than a mountain to summit. From there we explore his omnivorous collaborations, the Silk Road Ensemble, his relationship with the Davidov Stradivarius inherited from Jacqueline du Pre, the scoliosis diagnosis and spinal surgery that reshaped his sense of purpose, and performances at Ground Zero, the Boston Marathon memorial, the 2009 Obama inauguration, and the Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert.

• Why a 1/16-size cello was the compromise for a toddler who wanted the biggest instrument in the room
• How anthropology turned music into a horizontal map of human experience and dissolved the boundaries between Bach, bluegrass, and Piazzolla tangos
• Why the fretless cello's voice-like range lets it bridge Persian, Chinese, and Indian microtonal traditions in the Silk Road Ensemble
• The Davidov Strad that choked under du Pre's forceful attack and had to be coaxed, and the mimed inauguration performance in sub-freezing Washington
• Desert Island Discs picks of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a Swiss army knife, the 2017 Hollywood Bowl Bach marathon, and a tribute to Pablo Casals