The view from Ma's Silk Road

Fast forward eight years to this past Tuesday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the gains are impressive. The project has drawn together a loose collective of formidable instrumentalists, composers, and other artists. Many of the Silk Road Ensemble's regular members are younger musicians based in America, but their collaborations reach widely. The group has put out three recordings, commissioned more than 20 new works, and held residencies in locations ranging from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Chicago, where it is in the midst of a yearlong citywide festival. The idea that unites all of its wildly eclectic programming has not gotten any easier to define, but at its core seems to be a commitment to artistic cross-fertilization and a worthy belief that globalization need not bring about a vast homogenization of culture or a disappearance of local traditions.

The university community is a natural place for such a project to thrive, or so it seemed from the refreshingly informal program at Sanders, part of the second year in a five-year Silk Road residency at Harvard. Ma co-hosted the evening with professor William Kirby, and seemed happily in his element, strolling the stage with a cordless mike, engaging graciously and often playfully with the audience and with the student musicians of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra.

The program began with Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3, which had figured prominently in a film on China's Cultural Revolution screened earlier that day. As soloist, the young Israeli violinist and Silk Road Ensemble member Jonathan Gandelsman gave a wonderfully fresh performance, enlivened by his own partly improvised cadenzas. Even when playing from Mozart's printed score, Gandelsman is a delightfully unconventional fiddler. He does not have the big tone and imposing presence of a typical soloist but plays with a balletic lightness of touch and a sense of whimsy and imagination that are far more rare.