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Yo-Yo Ma. Chinese. Born in Paris. Raised in New York City.

Internationally renowned cellist with 18 Grammy® Awards to his

name and beloved by people all over the world.

He became a household name as a child prodigy, playing before

audiences from age 5 and performing for president John F. Kennedy

at age 7. At age 8, he appeared on American television with his sister

in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein and by age 9, he had

performed on Th e Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Since then, the now-63-year-old cellist has remained a household

name, performing in recitals or as a soloist with orchestras, making

several wide-ranging television appearances, from Sesame Street to

Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, and collaborating across genres

with artists such as jazz singer Bobby McFerrin, guitarist Carlos

Santana, singer-songwriter and guitarist James Taylor, street dancer Lil

Buck, and Brazilian singer and guitarist Rosa Passos. He’s performed

for eight presidents and is markedly one of the world’s best-known

musicians.

But as one who started so young, he admits there was never a

point where he committed to being a musician. He just “fell into it.”

And so, he was faced with the same problem that many child prodigies

face: How do you stay interested?

Perhaps this is where his multicultural background came into

play. In 1998, he founded the Silk Road Project (now, Silkroad) to

promote multicultural artistic exchange, inspired by the exchange

and intermingling of ideas and cultural traditions along the historical

Eurasian Silk Road trade routes.

In 2000, he began gathering musicians with wildly diff erent

backgrounds but who hailed from along the “Silk Road,” and brought

them together to perform at the prestigious Tanglewood Festival,

exploring music as a cross-cultural conversation and learning how

music brings people together around the world. Collectively known

as Yo-Yo Ma & Th e Silk Road Ensemble, those musicians went on to

record Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet.

Barely a year later, they were tested by the events of September 11,

2001—but it just reinforced Ma’s belief and determination that the arts

can connect the world and advance global understanding. Creativity

comes from the intersection of cultures. Th is exchange of ideas breeds

growth, and our future depends on this creativity.

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In Heroes Take Their Stands, the ensemble explores confl icting values and loyalties by heroic fi gures in history.

SILKROAD ENSEMBLE Brings Bold New Project to Segerstrom Hall

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Siavosh in Touran: Farewell to his Wife and Horse, inspired by

illustrations found in manuscripts of the Shahnameh (1010 CE), a

Persian epic, and composed by Kalhor, explores the impossible choice

between filial and national duty. Kalhory—on kamancheh—will be

joined by a string quintet and a percussionist, and the musicians will

share the stage with a shadow puppet play created by filmmaker and

puppeteer Hamid Rahmanian.

Arjuna at Kuru: Discourse With Lord Krishna, inspired by the

Bhagavad Gita (200 BCE) and composed by violinist Colin Jacobsen,

transcends the ancient story’s traditional geography, layering

shakuhachi and western strings onto Sandeep Das’s stirring tabla and

the transcendent Bharatanatyam dance of Aparna Ramaswamy.

Dou E at Chuzhou, based on the Yuan Dynasty play Snow in

Midsummer (1241 CE) and composed by Zhao Lin, recounts the

tragic story of a young woman who sacrifices herself to protect her

family. The story is told by 12 musicians, on instruments including

kamancheh, percussion, western strings, shakuhachi, pipa, tabla,

sheng, piano, and Galician bagpipes, and incorporates the pre-

recorded voice of a folk singer from northern China.

Elektra, written by Pauchi Sasaki and based on the The Oresteia,

explores the emancipatory power of language in the face of betrayal

and murder in three movements: “Despair,” “Words” and “Resolution.”

Her Lima-based multimedia collective will add electronic music and

video to string quartet, bass, tabla, percussion, Galician bagpipes, and

kamancheh.

A piece inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s address to Holt

Street Baptist Church in 1955 and composed by Jason Moran asks

what the legacy of that moment has become in today’s America,

pairing a score—to be performed in darkness—with a video

installation that transports audiences into the haunting void of an

abandoned church sanctuary.

Capturing the dilemma we face between conflicting values and

exploring how ordinary people can make a difference, the Silkroad

Ensemble will show us just how important the empathetic power of

music is in the human experience.

For more information on the Philharmonic Society, or a full listing

of the 2018-19 offerings, visit www.PhilharmonicSociety.org.

Exploring what music can accomplish, the Silkroad Ensemble is an

international music collective with a pan-global sound. The ensemble

is not a fixed group of musicians, but rather a loose collective of as

many as 59 virtuosic musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists

and storytellers from Eurasian cultures.

In The Music of Strangers (2016), a feature-length documentary

about Silkroad directed by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville

and developed alongside Silkroad’s Grammy-winning Sing Me Home

album, you learn about the diverse backgrounds of Silkroad members,

some of whom escaped repressive regimes. Pipa (Chinese lute) player

Wu Man escaped China’s Cultural Revolution. Kamancheh (Persian

spiked fiddle) player Kayhan Kalhor’s life as a refugee from Iran has

been marked by a series of tragedies. Kinan Azmeh is a clarinetist

born in Damascus, Syria, who laments the civil war in his home

country. Cristina Pato plays the gaita (a bagpipe from the Galicia

region of Spain) with such innovation and emotionality she’s earned

the moniker “Jimi Hendrix of the gaita.”

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Silkroad Ensemble (sans

its founder) brings a bold new project on the road: Heroes Take Their

Stands, which comes to Segerstrom Hall at the end of this month. For

years, folklorist Ahmad Sadri had been thinking about what it means

to be caught between two value systems, when loyalties conflict and

the choice is not right or wrong, but between incompatible obligations.

It’s a struggle that defines the human experience, he says, a tragic,

universal force that has created unexpected heroes across our history

and fiction. He wanted to capture the exquisite drama of this moral

borderland but wasn’t sure how.

“The enormity of it is such that it defies human language,” says

Sadri. “It is so ineffable, so excruciating that language is incapable of

expressing it.” Music, he thought, might be the answer. So he called his

friend Kalhor, a playmate of his during his childhood in Tehran.

Together, they conceived Heroes Take Their Stands, collaborating

with friends to craft an evening-length, multimedia work in five parts,

a cycle of stories from heroic figures in history that spans time, space

and the human experience. The new pieces are written by five different

composers for the Silkroad Ensemble, with instrumentation including

kamancheh, shakuhachi, tabla, western strings, pipa, Galician

bagpipes, percussion, sheng and piano.

HEROES TAKE THEIR STANDS: SILKROAD ENSEMBLEPHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTYSEGERSTROM HALLDate: April 30Tickets: $28 and up

For tickets and information visit SCFTA.org or call (714) 556-2787 Group services: (714) 755-0236