Abu Dhabi Festival 2017: Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble a fitting finale for closing night

Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, second from left, performs with the Silk Road Ensemble. Christopher Pike / The National

“Falling in love is one of the few human rights that no one can take away,” says clarinettist Kinan Azmeh from the stage at Emirates Palace, dedicating the Silk Road Ensemble’s final piece to his fellow Syrians who have “managed to fall in love in the past six years”.

With that, the 13 musicians launch into Wedding, a joyous group extrapolation of the traditional folk melodies one might still hear at a village marriage ceremony, building into an ecstatic improvised coda that distils the very essence of the all-star group founded by celebrity cellist Yo-Yo Ma close to two ­decades ago.

In Wedding, we hear the Silk Road Ensemble's international ethos, welcoming musicians and melodies from different backgrounds and continents – laying waste to the barriers ­between "classical" and "world" music, between the improvised and written, between old traditions and new approaches.

Wedding was one of two works performed on Friday (March 31) – the closing night of the 14th Abu Dhabi Festival – from last year's Sing Me Home, which recently won the Best World Music Album award at the Grammys.

But really, ­Azmeh’s composition provides further evidence of how ­redundant such labels are in the 21st century.

Exhibit B: The other new tune is Ichichila, a traditional Malian work song, here re-imagined by percussionist Shane Shanahan as head-nodding chamber-funk.

Now 61 years old, Yo-Yo Ma made his name while a young performer as a virtuoso classical soloist, but it is doubtless his inclusively international work with Silk Road that the Chinese-­American musician has to thank for his appointment as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2006. Yet in this music, one finds much conflict and division – particularly in two impressionistic new pieces that have to tell history in reverse to reach a happy ending.

Tabla player Sandeep Das’s King Ashoka begins with a Buddhist chant, representing the peace the Ancient Indian warmonger found late in life, then spirals into a gripping, four-way percussive showdown battle.

More sombre still is Silent City from Kayhan Kalhor – a Kurdish master of the traditional bowed kamancheh – which begins with a long, haunting improvised passage representing the ­chemical-attack massacre in the Kurdish city of Halabja, during the closing days of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, before building, looking backwards in time, to a celebratory dance of life.