Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott Wrap Up a Partnership With Thanks

Of all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s many, many collaborations, the one with the pianist Kathryn Stott has been among his most enduring.

Ma and Stott have been giving recitals and making records for 40 years. But time passes on, and as Stott, 65, prepares to retire from public performances at the end of this year, they have marked the passing of their partnership with a tour and a last album, “Merci” — a beautiful and poignant adieu through music by Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Lili and Nadia Boulanger.

Friends before they started playing together, Ma and Stott met in 1978 in rather unusual circumstances. Ma and his wife, Jill, were staying in London, where they sublet an apartment in Hampstead. “One especially hot day I was practicing — with almost no clothes on — when two people unexpectedly walked into the flat,” Ma, 69, has said. “It turned out that our landlord had failed to mention that he had a flatmate or to tell her that he had sublet his room! The flatmate was Kathy Stott. And that’s how a beautiful friendship began.”

Speaking from Berlin recently, Ma and Stott discussed their new recording, the notion of lineage in music and their time together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Kathy, this album seems to have several different layers to it.

KATHRYN STOTT It really does. One of my all-time favorite composers is Fauré. It’s 100 years since he died. I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but you know, what can you do? So that was one little idea. And then Yo-Yo and I both have connections to Nadia Boulanger, so we were thinking also about our heritage, our teachers and all the links of the composers on the album. Every single composer on there is linked through a story, or being a teacher, or being introduced to another. And then our kind of “merci” to each other for these remarkable 40 years that we’ve had, being musical explorers and otherwise.