Yo-Yo Ma knows how to celebrate and how to make people ugly cry.
After receiving his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday, the renowned cellist made his way to the waiting area and put on a surprise performance for his Massachusetts distribution center.
Though the 65-year-old could have easily spent the 15-minute observational period in silence, Richard Hall of the Berkshire COVID-19 Vaccine Collaborative explained to The Berkshire Eagle that Ma “wanted to give something back,” to the community.
Several videos of a masked-up Ma playing his cello to a crowd of recently vaccinate people were posted to the Berkshire Community College Facebook page on Saturday. He can be heard playing familiar songs such as “Ave Maria” and Bach’s Prelude in G Major, and the performance is unexpectedly emotional to watch.
As several fans have noted, the impromptu distribution center concert came exactly a year after the cellist kicked off his #SongsOfComfort concert series on Twitter.
“In these days of anxiety, I wanted to find a way to continue to share some of the music that gives me comfort. The first of my #SongsOfComfort: Dvořák – ‘Going Home’ Stay safe,” Ma tweeted on March 13, 2020, alongside a video of him playing.
Throughout the pandemic Yo-Yo Ma has worked to use his music to help alleviate people’s anxieties, and he recently released a track with concert pianist Kathryn Stott, titled “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” to benefit musicians who’ve been impacted by the pandemic.
Ma’s post-vaccination performance was both an incredibly fitting step in his personal pandemic journey and a hopeful sign of better days — and a return to some semblance of normalcy — ahead.
While Ma unfortunately won’t be touring to grace distribution centers around the country with his musical talents, at least you can watch the footage when it’s time to celebrate your own inoculation.