Yo Yo Ma 6 Chello Suites

The 40-year friendship between two musical titans, John Williams & Yo-Yo Ma, reaches a new peak with “A Gathering of Friends.” The incredible warmth & brilliance of composer/conductor John Williams is felt throughout this album of both his concert music (a newly revised Cello Concerto) and his legendary film music, including a powerful new arrangement of the Theme from “Schindler’s List,” brought to life by Yo-Yo Ma and the world-renowned New York Philharmonic. Another highlight from the John Williams film music catalog is Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of “With Malice Toward None,” an inviting and uplifting melody from the movie “Lincoln,” inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.

Inspired by a general love of the tango, and more specifically the tango of Astor Piazzolla, on the part of Yo-Yo Ma, the Soul of the Tango album is a masterful work of the nuevo tango, played by Ma's cello and many of Piazzolla's former associates. Piazzolla's old guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad even showed up to work on a pair of tracks arranged by Sergio: the Tango Suite (consisting of Andante and Allegro). The sheer beauty of one of Piazzolla's tangos is generally enough to warrant the purchase of an album involving them. An album such as this one, where all of the songs (save one: Tango Remembrances, where Ma plays along with outtakes from Piazzolla's recording of The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night album) are compositions by Piazzolla is even better. Add to this the masterful playing of Ma, and the surprising facility in which the cello fits into the tango, and you've got what could become a classic album, if only it weren't on the classical label from Sony.

The prize here is the Rachmaninoff cello sonata, a warm, hyper-Romantic musical tapestry that gives both the pianist and cellist a major workout. Ma is a superb chamber-music player, as is Ax. Both offer the kind of artistic give-and-take that a great performance of this music requires, while neither weighs the music down with excessive indulgence. The Prokofiev, a very different sort of musical beast, is a much lighter work, but it's done no less well. This is one of Ma's best chamber-music discs.

Over the last three or four years, Yo-Yo Ma has been exploring the peaks of the cello repertory in a quickly growing series of LPs. Those disks, in turn, have helped establish him not only as one of the finest cellists of his generation… The Kabalevsky…boasts a melancholy central Largo with the kind of long, arching cello line that allows Mr. Ma to display his rich sound.

Performing on the Baroque cello (outfitted with gut strings and without an endpin, making it so that the performer has to clutch the instrument between his/her legs), Yo-Yo Ma delivers the warm, listener-friendly classical music that he has become known for. Supported by conductor Ton Koopman's period Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Ma presents a wholly unusual interpretation of some of Bach's better known Baroque works, as well as some lesser known pieces by Italian composer Luigi Boccherini.

The classical works of Tan Dun typically fuse compositional elements from the East and the West, but for his soundtrack to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, musical cultures aren't so much blurred as coexistent side-by-side. While the magical martial arts film doesn't boast music as stunning as its visuals, this soundtrack is still beautiful and elegant, a perfect complement to the movie's mysticism. Just don't expect epic, John Williams-inspired bombast here. On "A Wedding Interrupted," the riveting brass and string section introduction segues into soft-hued meditations; "Night Fight" boasts spiky percussion but sounds more reminiscent of Stomp than a kung-fu scene. That said, Dun's understated score–filled with Asian instrumentation, Romantic cello solos from Yo-Yo Ma, and a token theme song with vocals by Asian pop star CoCo Lee–is still a fascinating listen. Fans of Ma and Dun shouldn't pass this up.