Yo-Yo Ma

Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood

Aug. 7, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

The Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-Yo Ma, used the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood like a high school during their Aug. 7, 2016 performance, presenting both lessons in social studies and the senior assembly. Eighteen years since being co-founded by Yo-yo Ma at Ozawa Hall, the Ensemble presented a program that displayed their global roots, with segments being introduced by various members, each of whom stressed the social while while eschewing the pedantic.

The Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-yo Ma performed at Tanglewood Aug. 7, 2016; Hilary Scott photo.

They talked about being ready now to leave home, after 18 years of growing up; but the effect of the concert was a synthesis of disparate musical traditions, culminating in a glorious global hoedown, to wit: Kinan Azmeh’s composition Wedding, his representation of a Syrian wedding celebration, a public jam session that could last for days. His dedication, to “all the Syriancs who have managed to fall in love in the past five years,” gave the audience an opportunity to express solidarity with those beleaguered people. An extra-musical takeaway from the evening was the opportunity to look at and celebrate the wild differeces among peoples without resorting to polemics. Extra-musical? yes – not beyond, but to the max!

The audience responded to the opening minute or so with tittering and noisy whispers, because of the novelty of a strange instrument on one side of the stage communicating with an equally unfamiliar one on the other side. By the time Fanfare for Gaita and Suona concluded though, the whole house was totally into the world music thing, and the party was on. The gaita is the bagpipe of the Galician people from the northwest part of the Iberian peninsula, the suona is a Chinese horn, and the piece was developed by the players Cristina Pato and Wu Tong, who are as dissimilar to each other in appearance as are their instruments.

Like many of their colleagues, these two were featured several times tonight; Wu Tong especially notable for his singing, including both Manchurian and English verses of Going Home, which may merit a place in World Music lore for being lyrics set to the score of Czech composer Dvorak’s 1893 New World Symphony while in America, and which sounds like a Shaker hymn! When everything is improbable, nothing is, so, another highlight of this show was the Ensemble’s almost cinematic rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train, which took the audience on a raucous, rumbling ride under the streets of Manhattan and Harlem, with images of Ella Fitzgerald and the Duke Ellington Orchestra flashing in their minds.

Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood

August 15, 2013 performance by Dave Read

If Tanglewood were simply Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its Tanglewood Music Center and eight or nine weeks of classical music performed by the BSO and their various guest soloists and conductors, we Berkshires locals would have plenty to be grateful for. But it is so much more, for so many reasons, not least of which is that Yo Yo Ma claims it as a sort of home for his seemingly boundless musical explorations. Incidentally, he also has an actual home in the Berkshires. (Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood photo: Hilary Scott).

His latest musical trip led to the Goat Rodeo Sessions, the 2011 album he recorded with bsssist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and mandolinist Chris Thile, which won Grammys for Best Folk and Best Engineered non-classical. Both the album and tonight’s show featured singer Aoife O’Donovan, of Crooked Still and Sometymes Why. She reprised No One But You, Here and Heaven, from the album and added a stunning rendition of Bob Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina.

Everybody but Mr. Ma took turns on other instruments; Meyer played piano on Franz and the Eagle, and No One But You; Thile, whose singing blended nicely with Ms. O’Donovan’s, also played fiddle and guitar; Duncan also played banjo. Except that Ma seemed to indicate that Meyer is musical director, the impression from the audience is that these are four musicians equally expert in their own domains and equally excited to be making music with peers, just for the fun of it.

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble June 24, 2012 concert review

June 24, 2012 Article by Dave Read

Yo-Yo Ma with musicians from the Silk Road Ensemble, Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood.; photo: Hilary Scott.

Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble got the BSO’s 75th anniversary season at Tanglewood off to a rousing start with a pair of concerts in Ozawa Hall June 22 and 24. Whatever Maestro Koussevitsky had in mind when he established the orchestra’s retreat and training center in the Berkshires, not even a visionary of his stature would have forseen a concert opening with a green haired gaita player wending her way through the audience.

As the musicians assembled on stage and settled into an improvisation called Wandering Winds, Christina Pato, a raven-haired Spaniard (streaked with Kelly green), strolled through the audience on the lawn playing the gaita, the bagpipe of the Galician people of Spain. She is the second Galician bagpiper I’ve seen in concert, after Carlos Nunez, who toured with the ChieftainsJimi Hendrix.

Galician bagpiper Christina Pato

Although fresh and original to all appearances, Ms. Pato is anything but a novelty act. She has a Doctorate from Rutgers and briefcase full of other academic credentials, leads her own touring band, and is a member of the Silk Road leadership council. The prominence of her role in this report is a function of my predilections; the show was so varied and full of treats that one couldv’ve focused on a dozen other elements.

Such as the finale, Turceasca, from the Romanian gypsy tradition. It allowed all 17 musicians to seem to solo simultaenously, until a duet/duel developed between Wu Tong and (oops!) Ms. Pato. Wu Tong plays the Chinese sheng with the verve and personality one remembers from Dizzy Gillespie.

Besides the role of host/MC, Yo Yo Ma was largely an ensemble player, except on Qasida, premiered on the 22nd. A Silk Road commission by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, from Uzbekistan, it was written for MA to play with Kayhan Kalhor on the ancient Persian kamancheh.

There were 20-30 minutes of encores, which resulted in as upbeat and cheerful an exiting audience as I’ve ever seen. They are sure to regale their friends about this event, a concert by the Silk Road Ensemble, at Ozawa Hall where Yo Yo Ma founded it in 2000. Depending on their predilections, they may focus their reports on the pipa, or the tablas, or the jang-go.

Yo Yo Ma tops Tanglewood program

Report of August 1, 2010 perfromance by Dave Conlin Read.

The composition of a Tanglewood program itself sometimes enhances the enjoyment of the various compositions that comprise a program; a transcending element to go along with the enjoyment of the program as performed by the musicians. On paper, this program at Tanglewood was sure to attact a large audience because of the presence on the bill of cellist Yo Yo Ma and the inclusion of the broadly popular Pictures At An Exhibition (the Maurice Ravel orchestration of Mussogorsky’s composition), under the direction of conductor Charles Dutoit, who has been a frequest guest here and in Boston for nearly 30 years.

And, with the cooperation of the iffy Berkshires weather, the Koussevitsky Music Shed was full and a few thousand more patrons and picnicers populated the lawn. But it was the opening item on the program that we found most remarkable; Jean Sibelius’ “Karelia” Suite, Opus 11, which had never been performed at Tanglewood, and only once by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Not only would we like to hear it again here, but we wonder why it hasn’t made it onto the regular rotation (if there is such?); it felt like a paean to this place – particularly the immediate Tanglewood environs as well as the greater Berkshires.

Which comports with the composition’s origin as a commission on the history of Karelia, the densely wooded region in northern Europe. Besides a delightful variety of sounds from the percussion section, the piece has an overall deeply sonorous feel. Gazing outside the Shed, the surrounding trees seemed to be as attentive to the music as the paying audience was.

When Yo Yo Ma settles onto the soloists chair near the podium, as he did to perform the Cello Concerto in E Minor, Opus 85, by Edward Elgar, holding cello and bow, it’s as if a new entity comes into being. Well, a pedestrain witness does himself no favor trying to describe artistry at this level. Berkshires resident Ma, who by all accounts is a friendly and humble gentleman, makes music at a level that could inspire composers, as a profound event or dazzling landscape would.

On the other hand, having such a popular soloist, or widely familiar piece on the program, always attracts patrons who are unfamiliar with symphony audience protocal; they’re like new parents who applaud every movement.