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WORLD MUSIC REVIEW
March 17, 2007
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Global Nomads By Mickey Butts
It's hard to know how to classify the performances of the Silk Road Ensemble. In a music shop, recordings of the group's concerts might sit just as comfortably on the shelves next to a Rough Guide world-music sampler or the latest classical release. The cross-cultural ensemble, formed in 1998 by superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma and constructed of equal proportions Western and Eastern instruments, plays an ear-pleasing mélange of styles, including Western and non-Western classical and traditional musics. Eastern instruments like the pipa (an upright Chinese lute), the tabla (Indian drums), and the kemancheh (a Persian spike fiddle) cohabitate freely with Western strings and percussion.
For this motley crew of instruments, the Silk Road Ensemble commissions new works that are every bit as "serious" as anything you'd hear at an evening of contemporary classical pieces. And it also plays toe-tapping, user-friendly renditions of the world's musical traditions, blended from disparate sources into a light smoothie of sound. Sometimes you feel like you're in a concert hall and other times like you're sitting around a fire with a band of Silk Road traders. Whether the final product of this crossover experiment in globalization is authentically traditional or purely classical music is subject to debate, and is beside the point, in any case.
This whirling-dervish, boundary-blurring approach pervaded the group's Saturday evening Cal Performances concert at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The most recent commission on the program, and also the most significant piece of the evening, was Sulvasutra by MIT composer, Bang on a Can All-Stars clarinetist, and gamelan orchestra leader Evan Ziporyn. The three-movement work for string quartet, tabla, and pipa is based on an ancient Sanskrit text about the creation of the universe.
Sulvasutra creates a spectral sound world filled with spacey atmospherics, hypnotic repeated motives, and slashing instrumental intersections. Ma fluttered up and down the fingerboard like a hummingbird, while the other string players alternated between high, ethereal string harmonics and low, close intervals along microscopically descending lines. Sandeep Das on the tabla and Yang Wei on the pipa laid down masterful counterpoint to the strings, with the tabla sounding a rapid-fire staccato at the end that evolved into the patter of rain.
Another significant commission during the evening's classical midsection came in Ancient Bell by Jeeyoung Kim. It is a powerful meditation on a 1,200-year-old, 25-ton bell in Korea, a recording of which brought the piece to an enlightening close. Long, lyrical lines from Ma combined with a complex five-beat rhythm from Dong-Won Kim on traditional Korean percussion and passionate vocals, as well as the sometimes jagged intervals from the violin line. On the first half of the set, Angel Lam's Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain had some stunning duets between aching strings and the breathy shudders of the traditional Japanese shakuhachi flute, along with a few Steve Reichian moments in the repetitions on the marimba. But the piece seemed to drift off into a haze, and felt too disconnected to add up to much. Traditionally inspired pieces bookended the rest of the concert. Worthy of a film score was the jam session titled Silk Road Suite, a mishmash medley that evoked Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese traditional melodies. And at the end, Turceasca offered up-tempo Romanian gypsy music, arranged by composer Osvaldo Golijov. It was a stirring close that brought the audience to its feet, and yet again for two encores, an odd multicultural, all-vocal rap from the instrumentalists and an otherworldly work spotlighting traditional flutes and the pipa.
(Mickey Butts is executive director, editor, and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, Food & Wine, The Industry Standard, Wired, Parenting, Sunset, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle.)
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