concert preview

Yo-Yo Ma
photo by Todd Rosenberg
Have culture; will travel. When superstar cellist
Yo-Yo Ma and the
Silk Road Ensemble return to Hill Auditorium Saturday evening—both to play and for Ma and the Silk Road Project to receive the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award as part of the 18th annual Ford Honors Program—it’s with 15 musicians from 8 different countries. Their packs will be fully loaded with musical traditions from Japan to Persia, India to Italy, and hybrids from everywhere in between.
If the ensemble’s programs take their cue from the mixing of cultures on the ancient Silk Road, they also reflect the cross-fertilization our present world permits. said Ma in a recent phone interview from Cambridge, Mass.
You get musicians like Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, Galician gaita player Cristina Pato and Indian tabla master Sandeep Das coming together. You get a composer and shakuhachi player like Kojiro Umezaki—Danish father; Japanese mother; raised in Tokyo, teaching in California—on the same bill as John Zorn, a downtown American composer whose “Suite from ‘Book of Angels’ the ensemble has arranged.
And you get highly interesting contradictions.
“So basically, here’s something weird, so on the one hand a lot of the music we play comes from very ancient sources,” said Ma, “but the other part is that the oldest piece of music of music we’re playing is 13 years old. We like mixing tradition and innovation. They sit well together. The idea of constant evolution in culture is as necessary as in nature.”
More after the jump…