Album of the Week: Yo-Yo Ma - Songs from the Arc of Life
Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott - The Making of Songs from the Arc of Life
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Album of the Week, starting Monday 14 September 2015 after 10am.
On this album longtime friends and collaborators, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott, offer a host of pieces they have frequently performed together but never before recorded, as well as a handful of new discoveries.
The two of them have mapped out a musical journey that expresses the arc of a life - through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and old age.
WATCH: Exclusive videos of Yo-Yo Ma introducing tracks from his new album >
The album begins and ends with two settings of the traditional Ave Maria – opening with the Bach/Gounod version and closing with Schubert’s.
In between is a remarkable spectrum of favourite pieces that includes Brahms’s Lullaby, Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, Elgar’s Salut d’amour, Gade’s Jalousie and Saint-Saëns’s The Swan, as well as richly evocative works by Debussy, Delius, Fauré, Gershwin, Grieg, Kriesler, Messaien, Schumann, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. Ma and Stott also include a haunting piece by the contemporary composer Giovanni Sollima, a friend and colleague of both artists.
It's a fine testimonial to exemplary music makers and their enduring, and evidently successful, partnership.
