If it hadn’t been for Yo Yo it would have been a no no. Nina (not Ananiashvili) and I returned to Lincoln Center on Tuesday for a concert by Yo Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble. Yo Yo is famous for his cello, and little did I know but the Silk Road Ensemble are his “friends” from “around the globe” who mostly hail from places en route from the Caucasus to Korea, hence their collective moniker.
Taking to the stage, Yo Yo Ma discussed the Tanglewood origins of the ensemble, charming the audience with his superior smile and well-tailored suit. He repeatedly referred to the other members as “friends”, with such redundant obviousness of emphasis on this word that I began to suspect it served him as a euphemism for something far more sinister that lays behind his enlightened demeanor.
Then the ensemble began the first piece of the Silk Road Suite, “Wandering Winds”, a “musical conversation” among Korea’s Dong-won Kim on jang-go , China’s Wu Tong on bawu, Japan’s Kojiro Umezaki on shakuhachi, with Yo Yo’s cello playing backup riffs to a mildly Persian theme reinforced by his friends jamming on their kim chi teriyaki instruments: Kayhan Kalhor on kamancheh, Wu Man on pipa, with even a cursory Indian, Sandeep Das, thrown in on tabla, among others less recognizable.
The rhythm was just noodlingly Persian enough to allow for monotonous nodding of the head while sitting. And so the night went on, with expert musicians masters in their respective genres, performing a lowest-common denominator style of pan-Asian groove music time and again. A pat on my shoulder from a Chinese girl behind me warned that a trickle of an amber-hued liquid was making its way down the slightly slanted makeshift amphitheater towards my bag.
The rest of the compositions that evening flowed in much the same way, with the understanding among friends clearly visible in the performers’ slow grins and gentle gestures of respect for one another. Conversations with foreigners are always limiting, but the musicians were obviously enjoying themselves, high on the promise of a world of love, the prospect of future endorsements on Wheaties boxes in 13 different languages, and their totally unexpected mutual admiration. And the audience’s bladders were mostly under control despite the collection of an apt yet abberated puddle under my seat, which continued to pick up new and richer hues as it coalesced.
From the dozens of shades of faces in the ensemble, there were only two stand-out performers: Wu Man, who performed “White Snow in the Sunny Spring”, a classic pipa solo; and Alim Qasimov, a bona-fide “Living National Treasure” from Azerbaijan, who sang two intensely semi-Azerbaijani pop pieces with his handsome wild-eyed daughter, Fargana Qasimova.
Yo Yo Ma is clearly using his fame to expose artists unknown in the western world. I suppose serious compositions would just obstruct the flow.
did you drink of the amber fluid?
no, that would amount to a loss of essence
I have always suspected . . .