Black Tie and Banjo, Yo-Yo Ma Brings Silkroad's 25th to Carnegie Hall

Yo-Yo Ma and Rhiannon Giddens headline Silkroad's 25th Anniversary Gala at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, November 14, with a 7 p.m. concert in the Stern Auditorium on the Perelman Stage, according to Silkroad's gala page.

Seventh Avenue at 57th Street will look like an opera opening that night. The dress code is black tie or national dress. Cocktails start at 5:30. Dinner follows the concert.

The man who started it all will be on stage with a cello. The woman who now runs it will be next to him with a banjo.

What Is Silkroad?

Silkroad is a collective of musicians from around the world, conceived by Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, according to the organization. The idea was to answer a question that sounds simple and is not. What happens when strangers meet?

The answer, for a quarter century, has been a band that does not sit still. The Silkroad Ensemble is a Grammy winner, and its players come from what Silkroad calls dozens of nationalities and artistic traditions. On a given night the stage can hold a pipa, a shakuhachi, tabla, accordion and a Celtic harp next to a string section.

Ma stepped back in 2017. The artistic director's chair stayed empty until July 2020, when Silkroad named Rhiannon Giddens to it, according to her Wikipedia biography.

Who Is Rhiannon Giddens?

Giddens is a singer, fiddler and banjo player from Greensboro, North Carolina, and she was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She won a MacArthur fellowship in 2017 and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Omar, the opera she wrote with Michael Abels. She has two Grammys of her own, one with the Chocolate Drops in 2011 for Genuine Negro Jig and one in 2022 for her album They're Calling Me Home. If you heard banjo on Beyoncé's "Texas Hold 'Em," that was her.

She and Ma are not strangers to each other. They recorded "St. James Infirmary Blues" together on the Silk Road Ensemble's 2016 album Sing Me Home, and released "Build a House" in 2022 with the Italian musician Francesco Turrisi.

Silkroad's American Railroad program also became a 2024 album, with Giddens among its musicians.

There are many ways of speaking - and we must speak - with every note, every sound, every beat we have within us.

That is Giddens, quoted on the gala page.

What Will They Play?

Silkroad has not published a program for the night. The Airmail arts listing, written by Matthew Gurewitsch, sets the scene instead. It says Ma will appear "on one (or more) of his priceless cellos," with Giddens on "banjo, viola, and vocals."

Silkroad's calendar adds Colin Jacobsen and other Silkroad musicians. Expect the stage to be crowded and the set list to wander across continents.

Ma has two famous instruments to choose from, according to his Wikipedia biography. One is the Davidov Stradivarius, made in 1712. The other is a 1733 Montagnana cello known by the unlikely name Petunia.

Yo-Yo Ma, New Yorker

Ma is a world citizen, but New York made him. Born in Paris in 1955, he played for Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy at seven and appeared on American television at eight in a program introduced by Leonard Bernstein. He studied at Juilliard with Leonard Rose and attended Trinity School in Manhattan before Harvard, where he took a degree in anthropology in 1976. In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The city has kept him close. He played with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park for the Statue of Liberty's centennial in 1986. In 1999 he famously left a cello in a New York taxicab, and it came back undamaged.

This month he was on the Geffen Hall stage again, playing Osvaldo Golijov's Azul as the Philharmonic warmed up for its European tour, as we reported.

What Does a Seat Cost?

The gala sells tables, and most of them are gone. Here is Silkroad's own price list, with Suite 646's arithmetic.

The top Hope Sustainer table costs $50,000 for ten guests, or $5,000 a seat. Silkroad's page lists one still available. The Tradition Preserver table at $25,000, or $2,500 a seat, is sold out. So is the Passion Igniter table at $15,000, or $1,500 a seat. A single Community Builder ticket at $2,000 is also sold out, though Silkroad invites people to ask in case more open up.

The gala page lists $45,900 of the top table's price as tax deductible. By our arithmetic, that values the evening itself at $4,100 for the table, or $410 for each guest, with everything else counted as a gift.

Concert-only seats are a separate matter. TicketNews reported in August that tickets for the Carnegie Hall performance were on sale through the hall's box office. Resale listings vary widely, so buy from Carnegie Hall directly.

What to Know Before You Go

The concert is Saturday, November 14, at 7 p.m. in Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium, 881 Seventh Avenue. Gala guests arrive for cocktails at 5:30 and stay for dinner after. Dress is black tie or national dress, even, one assumes, for the banjo.

Three nights earlier, the same stage hosts the Carnegie Hall debut of the mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina. The Silkroad night is the opposite of a debut. It is a homecoming.

Twenty-five years ago, Ma asked what happens when strangers meet. On 57th Street, the strangers are old friends now.