Yo Yo Ma 6 Chello Suites

Samuel Barber's cello concerto has long been considered the weak sister among his three concertos for solo instrument; this release may alter that perception. It was written in 1945, when he was thirty-five, a time in his life when he was still brimming with confidence about his music, not yet on the defensive against attacks received from many quarters, and not yet attempting to bring contemporary elements into his work. Some of the brouhaha was well-intentioned: Americans in the musical world naturally wanted our first internationally successful composer to represent us at our best, our newest and freshest; others decried his conservative romanticism out of personal jealousy at his wide acceptance.

Merci is a deeply personal expression of gratitude, a celebration of the powerful relationships that keep music alive. This effervescent recording is rooted in the compositions of Gabriel Fauré, whom Kathryn Stott calls her “musical soulmate,” and follows the arcs of his inspiration and influence, from the creations of his teacher Camille Saint-Saëns and his friend and supporter Pauline Viardot to works by his student Nadia Boulanger and her sister, Lili. Merci is testament to the gift of friendship, to the connections among performers, between students and teachers, and across generations that make music magic.

There are people who buy everything Yo-Yo Ma releases, and that's a good thing: his incessant musical curiosity and his ability to carry his audience with him constitute a true bright spot in today's classical music scene. Fans of the two Simply Baroque discs Ma recorded with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra will find much to like in Vivaldi's Cello, featuring the same musicians and offering several Vivaldi cello concertos plus Vivaldi works arranged for cello and ensemble by Koopman.

In 1995, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor joined forces on Appalachia Waltz, the first of a series of Sony Classical albums celebrating the varied musical textures of Americana. Over the course of six years, several albums were cut, among them Short Trip Home, Liberty!, Uncommon Ritual, and Midnight on the Water, in addition to the Grammy-winning Appalachia Waltz. Each project may have had its own specific instrumental focus, although the shared theme was clearly to obfuscate the genre lines that separate classical and traditional American music on a 200-year journey from the concert halls of Britain to the Shenandoah Valley.

Previn's Four Songs, using poems by Toni Morrison, continues the US song tradition established by Copland. They may not be strikingly original in style (they owe a debt to 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson), but they are very attractive, idiomatically American and movingly evocative of their texts. The set was written for Sylvia McNair, with a plangent cello obbligato for Yo-Yo Ma. McNair is outstanding here, her voice radiant but warm, soaring but secure.

Sony Classical is excited to present the fantastic 1984 recording of Yo-Yo Ma, Seiji Ozawa, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a newly remastered re-release. This stellar line-up got together to record R. Strauss’ Don Quixote - indisputably the composer’s finest example of musical painting, his most daring in design and most controversial in effects - and Schoenberg’s fascinating arrangement of Monn’s Harpsichord Concerto for Cello and Orchestra.

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma's new album "Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5" erases the border between orchestral and chamber music, presenting two of Beethoven's iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of Beethoven's orchestral works. Beethoven for Three transports listeners to the turn of the nineteenth century, when audiences would have been more familiar with the composer’s music in arrangements for piano trio, string quartet, or piano four hands than for full orchestra. Here, Ax, Kavakos, and Ma seek out the most essential elements of Beethoven's musical language, pairing his second symphony, arranged for trio by Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries, with his fifth — among the most recognizable pieces in western classical music — in a newly-commissioned arrangement by Colin Matthews.