Yo-Yo Ma
Born in 1955 in Paris to a musical family, Yo-Yo Ma has made it his lifelong work to bring the music of the cello to an ever broader audience. An early music lover, Ma began studying violin, then viola, then the cello - at age four. Public performances followed from the age of five onwards; by the time he was fifteen, Ma had graduated from high school and performed as a soloist with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra. After graduating from Harvard in 1976, Ma went on to a stellar career as one of the top players of the cello of his generation, earning accolades from critics for his live performances, as well as multiple Grammy awards for his recordings. His cello is as remarkable as Ma himself: the Domenico Montagnana cello was built in Venice in 1733, and is worth $2.5 million. Ma has also played the Davidov Stradivarius, which was passed on to him by cellist Jacqueline du Pré after her death. Ma is not content to confine himself to the classical canon: he plays a broad range of music, from baroque to tango, from bluegrass to the minimalist works of Philip Glass. Additionally, he has worked on film soundtracks with composer John Williams, including Seven Years In Tibet, and Memoirs of a Geisha, and with composer Tan Dun on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ma has created and plays with the Silk Road Ensemble, which brings together musicians from all the countries linked historically by the Silk Road.
