Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble - Silk Road Journeys Beyond the Horizon

Information

1. Indrajit Dey; Sandeep Das - Mohini (Enchantment)
2. Oasis
3. Zhao Jiping; Zhao Lin - Distant Green Valley
4. Akhalqalaqi Dance (Georgian/Armenian Traditional)
5. Zhao Jiping - Echoes of a Lost City
6. Kayhan Kalhor - Mountains are Far Away
7. Yanzi (Swallow Song) (Kazakh/Chinese Traditional)
8. Battle Remembered
9. Zhao Jiping - Summer in the High Grassland
10. Fikret Amirov - Kor Arab (The Blind Arab)
11. Uzeyir Hajibeyov; Mammad Ordubadi - Shikasta (Minstrel's Song)
12. Night at the Caravanserai (Turkish Traditional)
13. Kayhan Kalhor - Gallop of a Thousand Horses
14. Sandeep Das - Tarang (Currents)
15. Zhao Jiping - Sacred Cloud Music

Yo-Yo Ma, cello
The Silk Road Ensemble

Date: 2004
Label: Sony Classical

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Review

It was the German, Ferdinand von Richthofen who first invented the term ‘Silk Road’ towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. It represents the complex of trade routes (the ‘Silk Road’ was never a single road) which, for centuries, linked East and West, from Constantinople and Aleppo in the West to China in the East. It incorporates into its web southern Iran and parts of the Indian sub-continent, as well as the steppes of central Asia. Along these routes there passed not only goods and money, but religious and cultural ideas, stories and beliefs and, indeed, musical instruments and practices.

Yo-Yo Ma’s ‘Silk Road Project’, first conceived in 1998, seeks to do something, in the changed modern world, to replicate some of those processes of interchange, to allow mutual discovery to happen, for musical traditions to recognise both their similarities and their differences, to listen and to play together and, in doing so, to keep alive their own traditions as well as creating music which doesn’t lie within any one of those traditions.

It is probably only the name and presence of Yo-Yo Ma (and that the CD appears on the Sony CLASSICAL label) that gets music such as this noticed in the pages/web-pages of the Western classical media. I suppose it might just as well be considered under the rubric of ‘World Music’.

I would hope, though, that listeners whose normal fare is music within the western classical tradition would be sufficiently open-minded to give this CD an attentive listen – if they did then most, I feel confident, would find things to enjoy and to fascinate them. This is music produced through genuine collaboration and creativity; it is not merely ‘exotic’ sounds dished up for the western ear. Nor is it a case of Yo-Yo Ma ‘accompanied’ by musicians from outside the western classical tradition. Though the whole project is no doubt dependent on him, his ideas, his energy and – let’s be honest – his name, this is no ego-trip for Yo-Yo Ma. He is by no means the dominant performer here; on most of the tracks he is simply one of the ensemble, on some he doesn’t appear at all.

The 15 pieces on the CD are divided into three sections – headed ‘Enchantment’, ‘Origins’ and ‘New Beginnings’, but I am not sure that these point to anything very ‘real’ in the way of division or development. Some pieces are very brief and feel undeveloped, but many are utterly convincing in their creation of distinctive, yet interrelated, idioms. If there is a ‘star’ it is probably Alim Qasimov, a mugham singer from Turkish Azerbaijan, whose contributions to Kor Arab (especially), Shikasta and Night at the Caravanserai are hauntingly beautiful, emotionally powerful. It is perhaps because I have Iranian family connections that I find most satisfying the pieces in which Persian/Turkish and similar influences are most prominent, such as Kayhan Kalhor’s Mountains are Far Away and the traditional Night at the Caravanserai. Some of the ‘Chinese’ pieces I find a little lightweight, rather too much like ‘exotic’ film music. But this may only reflect the limitations of my own sensibility and, in any case, there are exceptions to my generalisation – as in Yanzi, movingly sung by Wu Tong, and Zhao Jiping’s Sacred Cloud Music which closes the CD.

There is much to intrigue, much to satisfy, for any listener not hide-bound in his or her habits, and it is a CD to which I shall return frequently.

-- Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb International

More reviews:
https://www.amazon.com/Silk-Road-Journeys-Beyond-Horizon/dp/B000AS1E16
https://www.amazon.com/Silk-Road-Journeys-Beyond-Horizon/dp/B0051YKS2A

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Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955 in Paris) is a French-born Chinese American cellist. Ma was a child prodigy. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University and has enjoyed a prolific career as both a soloist and a recording artist. He has recorded more than 90 albums and received 18 Grammy Awards. In addition to recordings of the standard classical repertoire, he has recorded a wide variety of folk music. Ma's primary performance instrument is a Montagnana cello crafted in 1733 valued at US$2.5 million. Another of Ma's cellos, the Davidov Stradivarius, was previously owned by Jacqueline du Pré.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-Yo_Ma

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The Silk Road Ensemble is a musical collective and a part of Silkroad. The ensemble is not a fixed group of musicians, but rather a loose collective of as many as 59 musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers from Eurasian cultures. The Ensemble has regularly commissioned new works from across a broad musical spectrum, and is known for its series of interdisciplinary festivals and residencies presented in North America, Europe, and Asia. They uses various instruments from the Silk Road region, and have performed in many locations along the historic Silk Road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkroad_(arts_organization)#The_Silk_Road_Ensemble

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