Yo-Yo Ma Joins Seattle Orchestra

While concert tickets are sold-out, audiences can still purchase Gala Packages, which include concert tickets, a pre-performance cocktail party, champagne intermission and post-performance dinner and dancing.

Whether performing a new concerto, coming together with colleagues for chamber music, reaching out to young audiences and student musicians, or exploring cultures and musical forms outside of the Western classical tradition, Yo-Yo Ma strives to make musical connections that expand his audience’s imagination. Ma has recorded more than 50 albums, including 16 Grammy winners. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the Glenn Gould Prize (1999), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Dan David Prize (2006) and the Sonning Prize (2006). Born to Chinese parents living in Paris, Ma began to study with his father at age 4. He is a graduate of both The Juilliard School and Harvard University (1976).

Violinist Ani Kavafian is enjoying a prolific career as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. She has performed as soloist with virtually all of America’s leading orchestras, from the New York Philharmonic to the San Francisco Symphony, and is in great demand at renowned summer festivals. Kavafian’s list of prestigious awards includes the Avery Fisher Prize and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Kavafian studied with Ivan Galamian at The Juilliard School, eventually receiving a master’s degree with highest honors. She is a violin professor at Yale University and was recently appointed as one of four concertmasters with Seattle Symphony.

The program highlights the creative output of three French composers and one American composer’s vision of Parisian life. It begins with the latter, George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a piece that brims with the optimistic vigor of pre-Depression life in the 1920s. This is followed by Gabriel-Urbain Fauré’s Elégie for Cello and Orchestra, a warm, yet somber piece originally intended as a slow movement for a larger work. Both Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Pavane for a Dead Princess demonstrate the composer’s unequalled mastery over orchestral color and love of antiquity and myth. Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 begins in a burst of energy—generated by a single orchestral chord—that immediately yields to a theme from the solo cello that undergoes a series of imaginative variations. The final work on the program, Ravel’s Boléro, is not only the composer’s best-known piece, but counts among the most-played works of the past century. -- www.seattlesymphony.org