Track Listing
Cello Concerto (2021 Revision)
01 – I. Theme & Cadenza (10:26)
02 – II. Blues (3:53)
03 – III. Scherzo (4:42)
04 – IV. Song (10:12)
Three Pieces from Schindler’s List
05 – I. Theme (4:24)
06 – II. Kraków Ghetto – Winter ’41 (4:16)
07 – III. Remembrances (6:35)
08 – Highwood’s Ghost (15:13)
09 – With Malice Toward None from Lincoln (4:11)
10 – A Prayer for Peace from Munich (4:32)
John
Williams and Yo-Yo Ma renew their celebrated, decades-long
collaboration and friendship with A Gathering of Friends, an all-new
recording from Sony Classical. The album is comprised of two acclaimed
concert works the composer wrote for the cellist, plus selections from
his film scores for Schindler’s List, Lincoln, and Munich.
Featuring Williams himself conducting the New York Philharmonic, A
Gathering of Friends also includes special appearances by the Spanish
guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas and harpist Jessica Zhou.
John Williams and Yo-Yo Ma first met some four decades ago, when the
Oscar-winning composer became conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra
and Ma was just beginning his remarkable solo career. Their creative
collaboration has extended from the concert hall to the scoring stage
to the 2008 inauguration of President Barack Obama, all anchored by an
abiding personal connection and mutual regard. From their first
encounters, each recognized in the other an understanding that, as
Williams simply puts it, “music is our oxygen.”
The centerpiece of A Gathering of Friends is the first recording of
Williams’ newly revised version of his Cello Concerto, a work
composed for Ma in 1994 and originally recorded for Sony Classical in
2001. As the four-movement concerto was performed over the last three
decades, Williams made significant revisions to the score. Ma noted
that the new version incorporates even “bigger changes,
structural changes,” with a final movement that turns into
“one glorious song, spinning and spinning, spinning to the very
end.”
Also heard on A Gathering of Friends are new arrangements Williams
created for Ma of three selections from his Oscar-winning score for
Schindler’s List and a new arrangement for cello and strings of
“With Malice Toward None” from his score for the 2012 film
Lincoln. The album concludes with a duo arrangement for Ma and
guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas of “Prayer for Peace”
from the 2005 film Munich. All three film scores are part of
Williams’ enduring partnership with director Steven Spielberg.
The other concert work on A Gathering of Friends –
Highwood’s Ghost – reaffirms the Williams-Ma friendship in
the context of the Tanglewood Music Festival and in the spirit of the
legendary composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein. Williams composed the
work to celebrate the Bernstein centennial at Tanglewood in the summer
of 2018, evoking the legend of a ghost said to haunt the Highwood Manor
House on the Tanglewood grounds – a ghost that Bernstein
memorably encountered. Williams wrote haunting solo roles for Ma and
the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s principal harp, Jessica Zhou, who
reunite for this recording with the New York Philharmonic.
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