eMusic Review 0
Cellist Yo Yo Ma’s musical adventures along the Silk Road continue with perhaps his biggest project yet: an album with his Silk Road Ensemble, made huge by the addition of a little band called The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Since beginning this extraordinarily productive series of concerts, recordings and educational programs in 2000, Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project have traced the lineage of the Western classical tradition back through the trade routes that brought people, instruments, and techniques from Central Asia into Europe, usually through Venice, during the so-called Age of Exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries. This has meant putting the violin, cello, flute, and other orchestral instruments in close contact with their musical cousins — fiddles from Iran, lutes from Uzbekistan, zithers from China. The addition of a full-on Western orchestra, especially one with the powerful collective voice of the Chicago Symphony, could easily have overwhelmed the chemistry that has developed within the Silk Road Ensemble. Happily, that has not been the case. The orchestrations here are usually restrained but telling, rising to a grand climax only on the rare occasions where the music specifically calls for it. And Osvaldo Golijov definitely calls for it… read more »