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Yo-Yo Ma-Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone

Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone [CD] [Import]
~ Yo-Yo Ma

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Product Reviews

Recorded with the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone sees the American cellist tackle some of the legendary Italian composer's most famous film scores. Produced by Morricone himself, the 2004 release features new arrangements of iconic soundtracks from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Cinema Paradiso, and Once Upon a Time in America, alongside lesser-known works from The Mission, A Pure Formality, and The Legend of 1900. ~ Jon O'Brien, Rovi

Product Notes

Yo-Yo Ma's first collaboration with acclaimed Italian film composer, Ennio Morricone. Features original cello & orchestra arrangements by Morricone of his most popular themes: "The Mission," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "Cinema Paradiso" and others.

Classical Data

Morricone: Once Upon a Time; Cinema Paradiso
56:00
Film
Classical
Yo-Yo Ma
France
Yo-Yo Ma is among the finest cellists of his generation, and a musician of unusually broad appeal. His great success is no doubt due to an easygoing, friendly stage personality in addition to his fine, adventurous musicianship. Indeed, Ma appears to have music in his blood: his mother was a singer in Hong Kong, his father a conductor, composer, and teacher. Although he had his first cello lessons at age four, memorizing two bars of Bach's cello suites every day, he had initially studied the violin, then the viola. When he was seven, the family moved to New York so that Ma could study with Janos Scholz. At the age of eight, Ma appeared on American television on "The American Pageant of the Arts," in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. He joined the junior department of the Juilliard School as a pupil of Leonard Rose. However, he left Juilliard in 1971, questioning whether he would continue with his cello studies despite international recognition while still in his teens. Ma eventually enrolled at Harvard, where teachers, including composers Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim, gave him confidence to continue. The most important turning point, though, was a trip to the Marlboro Festival, where he heard the great cellist Pablo Casals perform. Says Ma, "The commitment behind each note, the belief he had, was a wonderful example." In 1978 Ma won the Avery Fisher Prize, establishing himself as one of a very few genuine superstars in classical music. Since then, he has appeared with nearly all of the world's great orchestras and conductors. He also is active in chamber music, often in a piano trio with Young Uck Kim and Emanuel Ax; Ma and Ax won a Grammy award for their recording of the Brahms cello sonatas. In 1982 Ma was invited to appear in the inaugural concert of the London Symphony Orchestra's new concert hall at the Barbican Centre in London, where he played in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II. He has won numerous Grammy awards, recording such diverse music as Brazilian bossa nova, Argentine tango, American roots and bluegrass, and the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 1998 he founded the Silk Road Project, to explore the exchange of musical ideas that occurred along the trade route. His CDs of the early 2000s touched on both traditional and crossover repertory, with two albums of Vivaldi's music recorded with keyboardist and conductor Ton Koopman emerging as successful examples of the former, and the Obrigado Brazil CD becoming another crossover best seller. Yo-Yo Ma was named as Peace Amabassador to the United Nations in 2006 by Kofi Annan, and President Barack Obama honored him in 2009 by appointing him to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanitees. Playing a Montagnana cello and the "Davidov" Stradivari previously used by Jacqueline du Pr , Ma produces a relatively lean and focused, though warm, tone, with a tight, fast vibrato. His performances are a unique blend of rhapsodic and seemingly spontaneous music-making; at the same time, his playing is tempered by intellectually rigorous analysis and forethought. He places great importance on not repeating performances from the past, either those of other artists or his own. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi
Sure to remain a top seller on the classical charts for some time to come, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone is a new installment in the great cellist's long series of crossover albums. It diverges from most of the others, however, in its collaborative aspect: the music's original creator, Morricone, had as much to do with this album as did Ma and his creative team. Morricone's career in film music began during the era of the spaghetti Western in the 1960s and has flourished ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic. Morricone and Ma met at the 2001 Academy Awards, where Ma was performing and Morricone was nominated for his score to Giuseppe Tornatore's Mal na. They hatched the idea for this album together, and all the adaptations of Morricone's music are his own. He also conducts the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra. Overall, the results are gorgeous. Morricone opens and closes the album with pairs of excerpts from two individual films, The Mission and the rarely seen The Lady Caliph. In between are four suites of excerpts, three of them associated with Morricone's favorite directorial collaborators (Sergio Leone, Brian de Palma, and Tornatore). These suites, comprising varied but closely related stretches of music, really allow Ma to go to town. He has rarely achieved a more lushly beautiful tone or a more direct emotional appeal. Morricone deftly adapts his music for the cello-and-orchestra combination. At different times, Ma's cello plays the role of another solo instrument (the pan pipes in the Mission score, for instance), sings the wordless vocal lines that populate many of Morricone's scores, or plays lines of orchestral counterpoint that are elaborated into some pretty fancy fingerwork. The only complaints pertain to the selection of music, and it's debatable whether there's really anything to complain about. Represented here are Morricone's big, romantic scores, mostly of fairly recent vintage. Cinema Paradiso, two cues from which are included, is an example casual filmgoers may be acquainted with. The edgier, more experimental scores Morricone wrote for Western and suspense films are ignored, and it was these that endeared the composer to scenesters like John Zorn, who recorded a memorable deconstruction of The Big Gundown some years ago. On the few tracks where electronic elements are introduced, they aren't well integrated into the general concept. As a whole, though, the album hangs together wonderfully, and the music can stand up to anything in the current neo-Romantic rage. Play the "Cockeye's Song" cue from Once Upon a Time in America for classical purists unfamiliar with Morricone, and ask them to guess the composer. Watch them squirm. And then introduce one of the great composers of our time, presented by one of our foremost interpreters. ~ James Manheim, Rovi

Details

Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone
Classical & Opera
Classical Artists
28 September 2004
Yo-Yo Ma, Morricone
Import-Eu ~ Discs:1 ~ Country:Uk
UK
Compact Disc
SK93456
Yes
827969345627

Track Listing

Track # Title
1 The Mission: Gabriel's Oboe
2 The Mission: The Falls
3 Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Playing Love From The Legend Of 1900
4 Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Nostalgia From Cinema Paradiso
5 Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Looking For You (Love Theme) From Cinema Paradiso
6 Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Malena (Main Theme)
7 Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Remembering (Ricordare)*
8 Sergio Leone Suite: Deborah's Theme From Once Upon A Time In America
9 Sergio Leone Suite: Cockeye's Song From Once Upon A Time In America
10 Sergio Leone Suite: Main Theme From Once Upon A Time In America
11 Sergio Leone Suite: Main Theme From Once Upon A Time In The West
12 Sergio Leone Suite: Ecstasy Of Gold From The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
13 Brian Depalma Suite: Main Theme From Casualities Of War
14 Brian Depalma Suite: Death Theme From The Untouchables
15 Moses And Marco Polo Suite: Journey From Moses
16 Moses And Marco Polo Suite: Theme From Moses
17 Moses And Marco Polo Suite: Main Theme From Marco Polo
18 The Lady Caliph: Dinner
19 The Lady Caliph: Nocturne
# Title
  * We do our best to maintain an accurate database, but errors occur. Please use this list as a guideline.

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