Right after two concerts in Hong Kong and Beijing, Yo-Yo Ma will lead a multinational six-piece ensemble onto the stage of the Shanghai Grand Theatre, with a program of trans-cultural music pieces commissioned for his "Silk Road Project," for which he is the artistic director.

For more than 1,000 years, the venerable Silk Road has been a symbol of cultural exchange. It is no less a product of imagination and metaphor than an actual historical event, and this hybridity is what has made it such an enduring representation of cultural discovery and exchange.

Both the symbolism and the reality of the Silk Road attracted Yo-Yo Ma, who created the Silk Road Project as a way to study the global circulation of music and musical ideas.

One of the project's activities was to commission composers to write chamber pieces that evoke the spirit of East-West cultural exchange symbolized by the Silk Road.

So far, composers from China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan have completed their commissions, and two of these works will be heard in Sunday night's program - "Moon over Guan Mountains," by Chinese composer Zhao Jiping, and "Silk Road Reverie" by Zhu Jianer.

Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, from Azerbaijan, another composer, is represented by an earlier work, the masterful duet for cello and prepared piano, "Habil-Sayagy (In Habil's Style)."

The second half of the concert presents a work by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, which resonates with the evening's theme of cross-cultural musical exchange. Yo-Yo Ma will play the composer's "Sonata for Cello."

Though best known for award-winning film scores to movies such as "Raise the Red Lantern," "Farewell My Concubine," and "Ju Dou," Chinese composer Zhao Jiping's works have always been strongly influenced by the folk music of northwest China. Xi'an, the capital of ancient China and the origin of the Silk Road, has played a significant role in his composition. Through his successful collaborations with Chinese filmmakers, Zhao Jiping has given new legitimacy to his native folk music and brought it to the attention of a worldwide audience.

"Moon Over Guan Mountains," Zhao's commission for the Silk Road Project, deftly combines Eastern and Western instruments in a spirited multicultural conversation. The sheng, a 3,000-year-old Chinese wind instrument made from bamboo and bronze pipes, whose sound was said to imitate the distinctive call of the phoenix flying over the forests, complements the cello, pipa, and tabla, a set of two drums used in North India classical music. The title of Zhao's piece refers to a mountain range in northwest China through which the Silk Road caravans traveled.

Azerbaijani composer and concert pianist Franghiz Ali-Zadeh received her doctorate in musicology from Baku Conservatory, and exemplified the challenge of forging a bicultural career. As Ali-Zadeh explains, "after I completed my formal studies at the Conservatory, it was as if there had been some sort of misunderstanding. While I had studied Western music by day, I would come home every night to listen to a very different kind of music - the mugham, a complex collection of modally-based suites which comprises Azerbaijani classical music."

Inspired by the Azerbaijani spike fiddle, virtuoso Habil Aliyev, as well as by the music of American composer John Cage, Ali-Zadeh composed "Habil-Sayagy" for cello and prepared piano in 1979.

Prepared piano is a technique popularized by Cage, and Ali-Zadeh was the first pianist to perform the American avant-gardist's work in her native Baku. In "Habil-Sayagy," Ali-Zadeh prepares the piano with mutes, mallets and a string of glass beads to evoke the sounds of traditional Azerbaijani and Middle Eastern instruments. In so doing, she imaginatively transforms the piano into a small folk orchestra to support the soulful sweep of the cello, which itself evokes the sound of the spike fiddle as well.

For Chinese composer Zhu Jian'er, the Silk Road is both an historical moment and an ongoing musical experience which is ideally accessed in "a dream state and through one's imagination."

"Silk Road Reverie" features three traditional Chinese instruments, erhu, pipa, and sheng, and evokes both the beauty of the Chinese landscape and the resilience of human imagination.

Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly's "Sonata for Cello" will follow. "Hungarian culture is an eternal struggle between tradition and Western culture," the composer once wrote. "One of our hands holds the hand of the Nogay-Tartars, the Votyaks and Cheremiss, the other, that of Bach and Palestrina. Can we bring these two distant worlds together?"

Kodaly traveled extensively in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe to study and collect authentic folk music. The music that Kodaly found in the villages was all but unknown to city dwellers. Perhaps it is to underscore his own sense of culture shock, Kodly's compositions seem sometimes to exaggerate the brutality and wildness that he experienced in folk music.

In the "Cello Sonata," Kodaly distills his folk music discoveries into a modernist language that is by turns joyously soulful, astringent, and darkly lyrical. Yo-Yo Ma said about the sonata: "Not since the Bach suites did someone stretch the limits of the cello as much as Kodaly did."

Chinese Rock singer Wu Tong will be on the sheng that night, giving the concert another twist of flavor. Wu graduated as a specialized traditional Chinese wooden pipe player from Central Conservatory of Music before he started his hard rock band "Again." He received the invitation from the Project in 1998, when he was giving a lecture at the music school of the Michigan University.

Two other Chinese musicians, Xu Ke and Yang Wei, will play the erhu and pipa at the concert, with a Central Asian percussionist and two Western musicians on piano and tabla.

(EastDay.com 03/02/2001)