The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma will perform this September in six European music festivals as part of the Silk Road Project’s tenth-anniversary tour. The group will play three programs in London, Ghent, Brussels, Lucerne, Cologne, and Bucharest, with repertoire that reflects the ensemble members’ countries of origin. Among the works scheduled for the tour are Giovanni Sollima’s The Taranta Project, which combines elements of classical, rock, and jazz; Osvaldo Golijov’s Air to Air, which incorporates Christian and Arabic melodies, indigenous voices from Chiapas, Mexico, and protest songs from eighteenth-century Sardinia; Evan Ziporyn’s Sulvasutra, a meditation on an ancient Sanskrit treatise, written for tabla player Sandeep Das; and Angel Lam’s Empty Mountain, Spirit, written in memory of the composer’s mother. Concerts will also include a composition based on ancient Persian lament; a Kazakh folk song arranged for voice and cello; and a third-century Chinese piece scored for cello, violin, ruan, sheng, and tabla. The Silk Road Project—a nonprofit cultural and educational organization that conducts cross-cultural exchanges and residencies, leads workshops for students and educators, and commissions new work—will wind up its tenth-anniversary celebrations in April 2010 with a tour to South Korea, Taiwan, Macao, and Singapore, followed by a tour of U.S. music festivals in August 2010.
Posted August 14, 2009
