Yo-Yo Ma and the ac­claimed Silk Road En­semble per­form works com­mis­sioned by the Silk Road Pro­ject along with tra­di­tion­al pieces from the Silk Road lands.

In June 2012, 16 mu­si­cians from the U.S., In­dia, Korea, Is­rael, Spain, Ir­an, Switzer­land, Ja­pan, and China con­verged for a week at Tangle­wood, the Bo­ston Sym­phony Or­ches­tra's idyll­ic sum­mer re­treat in the Berkshires of west­ern Mas­sachu­setts. The oc­ca­sion: two con­certs to open Tangle­wood's 75^th sea­son that were filmed by BFMI.

This week also marked the Silk Road En­semble's 12^th an­niversary. It was here at Tangle­wood in 2000 that this ever-evolving group of mu­si­cians first came to­geth­er from ho­met­owns around the world to ex­plore what an open meet­ing of cul­tures could sound like.

"Then we were strangers," said the artist­ic dir­ect­or Yo-Yo Ma, "and many of us had only the lan­guage of mu­sic in com­mon. Over the years, we've re­turned sev­er­al times to de­vel­op new mu­sic. So Tangle­wood is, if you will, the En­semble's birth­place, and it re­mains an in­spir­a­tion for us."

That week, an un­com­mon heat wave made for some swel­ter­ing re­hears­als, but spir­its stayed high and the threat of showers held off on the even­ings of the per­form­ances. Grate­ful lawn audi­ences stretched far up the hill past the open doors of Seiji Oz­a­wa Hall.

Galician bag­piper Cristina Pato brought her gaita in­to the woods to film for a title se­quence. The cloud of mos­qui­tos she had to walk through likely won't show up on film—nor will the red ants that climbed up the steadycam op­er­at­or's leg while he filmed. Hap­pily for our audi­ence, he bravely held his shot.

The con­cert doc­u­ment­ary is made by Mor­gan Neville from Trem­olo Pro­duc­tions, an award-win­ning doc­u­ment­ary film­maker who spe­cial­izes in cul­tur­al sub­jects. The con­cert film comes to­geth­er with 120 minutes of pure con­cert re­cord­ing.