Yo-Yo Ma joins longtime collaborator Emanuel Ax alongside violinist Leonidas Kavakos for Brahms Trios, available now from Sony Classical.
“I’ve been working with Manny Ax for about 46 years,” says Yo-Yo Ma, “and because we’ve been through all the different phases of life together, we share a certain level of communication. Adding someone like Leonidas – whom I’ve just met recently – into the mix opened up all new ways of communicating. We just played together after a dinner one evening, and the chemistry, visual and aural, was totally amazing. It’s kind of a miraculous thing: slightly body language, slightly temperament.”
Brahms Trios is the group’s first recording together. “To be able to work on these masterpieces again with my friends Leonidas and Yo-Yo is a great privilege,” notes Emanuel Ax. “The glory of such musical masterpieces is that no one performance can exhaust everything in them. It is because of the infinite depth and variety of Brahms’s genius that we hope to be part of the long tradition of this wonderful music.”
“It has been an experience full of musical joy” says Leonidas Kavakos. “It is my hope that listeners will join us in experiencing all this and more, in what has been an absolutely amazing musical and human journey.”
You can discover the album today
The trio will reunite for a series of US performances in the 2018 concert season.
