The view from Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road The Boston Globe reviews the Ensemble at Harvard Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project has clearly come of age. When it was formed eight years ago, it seemed like a very promising idea whose exact trajectory was less clear. It was to be some sort of musical think-tank, performance enterprise and educational initiative rolled into one…. Many observers were intrigued, but what exactly this project would yield was anyone’s guess. Fast forward eight years to this past Tuesday night [October 17] at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, and the gains are impressive. The project has drawn together a loose collective of formidable instrumentalists, composers, and other artists…. The idea that unites its wildly eclectic programming has not gotten any easier to define, but at its core seems to be a commitment to artistic cross-fertilization and worthy belief that globalization need not bring about a vast homogenization of culture or a disappearance of local traditions. The university community is a natural place for such a project to thrive, or so it seemed from the refreshingly informal program at Saunders, part of the second year in a five-year Silk Road residency at Harvard. Ma co-hosted the evening with Professor William Kirby, and seemed happily in his element, strolling the stage with a cordless mike, engaging graciously with the audience and with the student musicians of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. The program began with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3, which had figured prominently in a film on China’s Cultural Revolution screened earlier that day. As soloist, the young Israeli violinist and Silk Road Ensemble member Jonathan Gandelsman gave a wonderfully fresh performance, enlivened by his own partly improvised cadenzas. Tuesday’s program also featured the fourth movement of Poems from Tang for string quartet and orchestra by the prominent Chinese-American composer Zhou-Long. It’s a wild, visceral scherzo inspired by an eight-century poem about a band of carousing poets. The score is a fascinating mix of thorny avant-garde writing and a delicate sound world designed to evoke more ancient Chinese musical traditions. Ma, Gandelsman, the violist Nicholas Cords, and the violinist Colin Jacobsen were the excellent soloists. The student orchestra had clearly invested much energy to learn this difficult piece, and under the direction of its conductor, James Yannatos, its efforts paid off. - Jeremy Eichler Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. Excerpted with permission. The complete article was published in the Boston Globe on October 20, 2006.
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