By Dave Read, Aug. 20, 2026 performance – The Silkroad Ensemble played a homecoming concert in Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood campus tonight, even if no talk about the big game was overheard in the bleachers.
Silk road is an ironic metaphor for international trade, which never was and never will be smooth as silk. The impetus at the foundation of the Ensemble is to celebrate international cooperation by remembering the music heard along the great silk road network that ran between the eastern and western worlds up through the Middle Ages.
Berkshireite and regular BSO guest cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Ensemble and led it’s debut concert in Ozawa Hall in 2000. In 2020, Rhiannan Giddens was named music director. Mr. Ma was born in Paris, moved with his family to Boston at age seven, then studied at Julliard and Harvard. Ms. Giddens was born in North Carolina and went to college there and at Oberlin in Ohio, before moving to Ireland.
It’s funny how these things play out – the trade route that gave the band its name has various names today, none more prominent than the Strait of Hormuz, upon which depends a significant portion of global commerce. Concerts by the Silkroad Ensemble can effect messy world affairs by their offer of refuge from them, so that we return to our struggles refreshed and invigorated.
We know that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, but do we know also that music, like poetry, makes nothing happen?
I would argue that the highest function of music (and poetry) is to encourage estimable behavior in people who listen to music (and read poetry). Nobody can be made to be refreshed and invigorated by a musical performance, but the people who are so effected are the people we need involved in society, especially in politics.
Whereas Paris-born Yo-Yo Ma appears to have been thoroughly Americanized, the native North Carolinian Rhiannan Giddens cut her teeth on the traditional music of the African-American south, which befits her leadership of a band that celebrates the folk music that arose in the environs of the old silk road.
Tonight, we exited Ozawa Hall refreshed and invigorated because the music was so beautiful and because nothing remotely political was heard from the brilliant musicians of the Silkroad Ensemble.
Silkroad Ensemble personnel
- Rhiannon Giddens, Banjo, Viola, Vocals, and Artistic Director
- Yo-Yo Ma, Cello and Founder
- Kinan Azmeh, Clarinet
- Shawn Conley, Bass
- Sandeep Das, Tabla
- Haruka Fujii, Percussion
- Maeve Gilchrist, Celtic Harp
- Colin Jacobsen, Violin
- Wu Man, Pipa
- Karen Ouzounian, Cello
- Shane Shanahan, Percussion
- Mazz Swift, Violin and Vocals
- Francesco Turrisi, Accordion and Percussion
- Kojiro Umezaki, Shakuhachi
- Kaoru Watanabe, Japanese Flutes and Percussion
Tanglewood tickets and transportation to the Berkshires
For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.