Yo-Yo Ma and Silk Road Ensemble at the Mann: Beyond borders

The numerous far-flung elements of Yo-Yo Ma's musical existence might not have been expected to come together, but come together they have. The cellist - who plays many standard concertos, premieres a new one every season or so, and seems never to have met a musical ethnicity he doesn't like - brings his genre-blurring Silk Road Ensemble to the Mann Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, with names that also turn up at his orchestral concerts.

That could mean that one side or the other of the Ma equation is getting tame. But among the less-familiar composers on the program is Giovanni Sollima, whose Silk Road piece The Taranta Project springs from a singular temperament: The Sicilian cellist/composer's performances on YouTube show him playing with clenched teeth and extraordinary velocity - far beyond the extravagant physicality for which Ma was criticized in his early years.

"He makes me look like a pussycat!" said Ma, 54, sounding proud and almost relieved. "He's very elusive. He goes silent for months at a time. You just can't find him. He's a supervirtuoso of the cello. He studied with [the eminent] Antonio Janigro but plays like a jazz musician and is part performance artist. He has no fear, and that's unusual in the classical world - we're all terrified of wrong notes."

These days, Sollima is Ma's kind of colleague, further undermining the image of a rarefied classical artist moving only in the most civilized circles. These days Ma is one degree of separation from musicians like this, intensively surrounding himself with the ever-shifting personnel of the Silk Road Ensemble, whose members think about music as cultural DNA rather than in terms of the genre caste system of the music industry.

The group's idea over the last decade has been to emulate the kind of cultural cross-pollination that occurred in centuries past when the silk trade opened the East to the West. Initially, critics flipped through the group's fancy press kits puzzling over what such an endeavor could possibly sound like, and marveling at how Ma was going to any lengths to ward off boredom.

Now, however, the group has toured 23 countries, has five recordings - with titles such as New Impossibilities and Off the Map - and isn't far removed from the ethnic fusions of the Kronos Quartet, which augments its string contingent with musicians from the Middle East and Asia.