Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, was born in Vienna in 1874. Sony Classical is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the great composer’s birth with the reissue of 20 CDs of recordings from CBS/American Columbia. The company was a pioneer in documenting Schoenberg’s achievements and already demonstrated that commitment during his lifetime (he died in 1951). In 1940, with the composer conducting, Columbia Masterworks produced the first recording of one of his most captivating and revolutionary works, Pierrot lunaire; and in the 1950s and 60s, the label undertook a ground-breaking multi-volume series entitled “The Music of Arnold Schoenberg”. But arguably no recordings have done more to further the cause of Schoenberg’s orchestral and vocal works than those of Pierre Boulez, while none have done more to promote his chamber music than those by the Juilliard Quartet. Sony Classical now presents all of Boulez’s Schoenberg for CBS/Columbia in a 13-CD box, and all of the Juilliard’s in a 7-disc set.

Sony Classical is pleased to announce a new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest instalment of the popular series showcases Mozart and Chopin along with conductor Robert Craft’s pioneering Webern recordings and the global journeys of that irrepressible musical explorer Yo-Yo Ma.

The supremely versatile Yo-Yo Ma has been aptly referred to as a musical omnivore. In addition to all the significant classical works written for his instrument, the eclectic cellist has passionately embraced the music of Latin America and Asia as well as American bluegrass and jazz. Seven of his most adventurous and acclaimed musical journeys have been collected by Sony Classical in a CD box entitled “Crossing Borders”. They include Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer (Grammy 1998: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Soul of the Tango – The Music of Astor Piazzolla (Grammy 1997: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Obrigado Brazil – traditional songs and compositions by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Pixinguinha (Grammy 2000: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet and Japanese Melodies; Anything Goes: the cellist playing mostly Cole Porter with Stephane Grappelli; and, last but not least: Hush, his famous collaboration with Bobby McFerrin.

Review excerpts of previously released volumes included in this set:

Appalachian Journey / Yo-Yo Ma, O'Connor, Meyer

The Mark O’Connor/Yo-Yo Ma/Edgar Meyer power trio took a while to follow up their 1996 hit Appalachia Waltz, yet, no doubt about it, Appalachian Journey was worth the long wait. I love the gnarly funk of the opening cut, “1B”, with hard swinging fiddle and cello lines anchored by Meyer’s earthy, off-center pedal points. The less driving, more reflective reels, and lyrical Duet for Cello and Bass fuse bluegrass, wistful folk tunes, and stark Copland-esque landscapes into organic wholes that sound better with each rehearing. The deliciously virtuosic Caprice for Three proves that players of this caliber can channel their super-chops toward listening out loud. Guest vocal stints by James Taylor and Alison Krauss add the spice of variety to the mix, along with a potential wider audience. And why not? The arrangements are judiciously varied, perfectly paced, and exploit the violin/cello/string bass configuration in ingenuous ways. One wonders how this trio might approach certain pieces over a looser, more extended improvisational time frame. I hope we won’t have to wait another three and a half years to find out. If you’re in a blue mood, this disc will provide an antidote with long-range positive side effects. Fun, fun stuff.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10, Jed Distler)

Obrigado Brazil / Yo-Yo Ma:

The music on this enchanting, flavorful CD varies from classical to samba to bossa nova; the combinations range from guitar, flute, and cello to female voice (the remarkable Rosa Passos), cello, guitar, percussion, piano, and bass; to simple cello and piano; to cello and two guitars. The overriding element is rhythm; each selection has a beat which is both infectious and sensual, but the contexts are splendidly varied. It's impossible to get bored or tired listening to this creative CD; it's unique--just like Yo-Yo Ma himself--and endlessly surprising. It may not be quite what we'd call "classical" music, but it is many kinds of music, and they all will delight. The other musicians are as impressive on their instruments as Ma is with his cello, and that's saying a great deal.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Robert Levine)

Silk Road Journeys - When Strangers Meet

Silk Road Journeys is an invigorating, eye-opening ride. To be sure, some pieces fare better than others, but as with any unforgettable trip, you tend to forget the occasional bumps you hit along unknown roads. Our guides are a generally stellar selection of master artists, including the luminary pipa player Wu Man and kemencheh and setar player Kayhan Kalhor. These two musicians in particular can go head-to-head in virtuosity with Yo-Yo Ma any day. Complemented by cleanly articulated sound, Sony Classical has produced a real keeper in its Yo-Yo Ma catalog, but the cellist makes his collaborators the true focus of this album.

Intriguing; the Harrison and the Bloch are outstanding.

This is a very miscellaneous collection, but then followers of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project will have come to expect nothing less. This particular CD was recorded as the climax of the Project’s year-long association with the city of Chicago. During that year Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road ensemble interacted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This involved a series of events which celebrated and explored many kinds of intercultural musical exchange, going beyond the specific cultural meetings and transferences which the Silk Road itself facilitated.

Here we have a sampling of such interactions, some rather more familiar and ‘mainstream’ than others. Of Jewish background, born in Switzerland, and a student in Belgium, Germany and France and resident in the USA from 1916 until his death - bar a return to Europe in the 1930s - Ernest Bloch was something of a one-man intercultural ‘event’ in himself and his music was always open to a variety of influences. Subtitled a ‘Hebraic Rhapsody for cello and orchestra’, Schelomo (Solomon) was written between December 1915 and February 1916. Bloch’s own programme notes for the piece spoke of the cello as “the reincarnated voice of King Solomon” and suggested that the orchestra was “the voice of his age … his world … his experience”. The languorous dances and slow, meditative music of much of the work’s first section are well and expressively played by Ma and the CSO under Harth-Bedova, the note of despair, of the all-embracing sentiments of Ecclesiastes (of which Solomon was, traditionally, the author) – “Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity” – never far from the surface. But perhaps this performance doesn’t quite do justice to what Bloch called the “complete negation” which characteries the work’s conclusion, where the playing seems a bit too ready to settle for rhetorical effect rather than substance. But, overall, this is a performance which puts a good case for the work and is well worth hearing.

The other familiar work is Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite - in which the CSO is conducted by Alan Gilbert - which grew from the young composer’s fascination with the nomads of the steppes, without too much in the way of direct borrowings from the music of such tribes. The modern listener is most likely to find in it a slightly politer, more westernied version of The Rite of Spring and indeed this work, like Stravinsky’s, was grounded in the composer’s collaboration with Diaghilev. Prokofiev’s rhythms are less complex and fierce than Stravinsky’s, the sense of ritualistic violence less intense, though the orchestration is brilliant and striking. The reeds of the CSO are particularly impressive in ‘The Adoration of Veles and Ala’, the first movement, while there is disciplined orchestral power galore in the opening of the second movement, ‘The Enemy God and the Dance of the Black Spirits’. Somehow, though, the performance doesn’t quite do full justice to the ominous, distinctly ‘Russian’ music of this movement, lacking the ultimate in intensity and drive. The dark evocativeness of the first part of ‘Night’ is more convincing and the final movement, ‘’Lolly’s Glorious Departure and the Ceremonial Procession of the Sun’ catches fire in the closing imagery of the rising sun. For all the efforts of orchestra and conductor, it is hard to see Prokofiev’s ballet music - striking as much of it is - as more than superficially involving any real cultural interaction.

From that point of view, Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto is more richly suggestive. The pipa is, to put it crudely but briefly, a kind of Chinese lute, with a pear-shaped wooden body. Harrison’s ‘concerto’ is very obviously the work of a man who, by the date of its composition, was steeped in oriental musical traditions and had given real thought to how they might exist creatively alongside western instruments and conventions. For Harrison the interface between oriental and occidental musics is familiar territory, a territory in which he can be unaffectedly and unpretentiously creative. As a result there is an ease and certainty of purpose to this concerto, which is beautifully played by Wu Man – some will have heard some of her other collaborations with, inter alia, Kronos Quartet and Yuri Bashmet. The concerto – which is perhaps better described as a suite than as a concerto if one insists on using western terminology – is various in mood and a thing of considerable beauty. In four movements - though one of them consists of four more or less distinct sections - the opening allegro balances eastern and western formality in a dialogue that has dignity and substance, while the fertility of Harrison’s eclectic imagination is evident in much of what follows. In ‘Troika’ the pipa sounds almost like a balalaika and in the brief ‘Neapolitan’ there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, but quite delightfully, echoes of the Italian mandolin tradition. In ‘Three Sharing’ the orchestra drops out and we are treated to a percussive conversation between the pipa of Wu Man, the cello of John Sharp and the double bass of Joseph Guastafeste. The most conventionally oriental episode comes in ‘Wind and Plum’, where the pipa’s cadences, against a lush orchestral background, are incisive and evocative. The penultimate movement is a lament, a ‘Threnody for Richard Locke’, a five minute elegy, powerfully melodic and exquisitely grave. By contrast the ‘concerto ends with an ‘Estampie’, in which medieval and renaissance dance rhythms meet (very fruitfully) the sounds of one of the lute’s ancestors. This whole concerto – the last of Harrison’s large-scale works – is the high spot of this disc.

In ‘Legend of Herlen’ the Mongolian composer Byambasuren Sharav draws on both native Mongolian traditions and instruments and on Western music. Western brass, in the shape of three trombones, and percussion - along with a piano - sit alongside the morin khuur, a two stringed fiddle and the sound of Khongorzul Ganbaatar, an exponent of the Mongolian tradition of ‘long song’, full of sustained and richly ornamented phrases. The results are intriguing and at times very beautiful, but perhaps most satisfying when Ganbaatar’s voice is accompanied solely by the morin khuur; the writing for western instruments is relatively pedestrian and predictable and actually seems to add very little to the Mongolian essence of the piece.

How far the Silk Road project has really succeeded – with anything like consistency – in uniting disparate musical traditions is a matter for debate. What is surely undeniable is that all their recordings have, at the very least, been stimulating, engaging and challenging. This new recording is no exception.

-- Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb International