“Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who has soothed us during the pandemic with ‘Songs of Comfort,’ also puts Fred Rogers, Pablo Casals and his Benoît Rolland bow on his list of cultural essentials,” writes Kathryn Shattuck in Tuesday’s (6/9) New York Times. “Sheltering at home in Cambridge, Mass., … Mr. Ma, 64, … ‘realized that my wife and I have only been living under stress,’ he said… The 10 things that have helped him through the lockdown” include Aesop’s Fables and the Panchantantra stories, which “deal with, essentially, observations of the human condition,” he says. Other outlets include Scotch tape (“like a Band-Aid for music because the scores fall apart”), Fred Rodgers (“Do we need him now or what?”), Pablo Casals (“He’s the one who played each [Bach] suite in its entirety … the first cellist who gave it that meaning that today a lot of people ascribe to as music that gives you solace, consolation”), science, Emanuel Ax (“one of the nicest human beings on earth”), swimming, and a Sustainable Development Goals Pin: “the goals of the United Nations for 2020 that will allow us to have a healthy planet and healthy population, no poverty, zero hunger, quality education, gender equality, et cetera.”
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