87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival

Yo-Yo Ma's return to the Teatro del Maggio

Saturday June 14th 2025 at 6 pm - in co-production with Amici della Musica di Firenze - the return of the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma to Florence, in an extraordinary concert as part of the 87th Maggio Festival.

The program features music by Zhao Jiping, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ahmet Adnan Saygun and George Crumb

Florence, June 12th 2025 – More than twenty years after his last performance in Florence, Yo-Yo Ma - one of the greatest cellists of all time - returns to the Maggio Festival. The concert, in co-production with the Amici della Musica of Florence, is scheduled in the Mehta Hall on Saturday June 14th at 6 pm. Another event in co-production with the Amici della Musica of Florence is on the program just forty-eight hours later with the concert by Grigory Sokolov, scheduled for June 16th at 8 pm, again in the Mehta Hall.

Yo-Yo Ma performed in Florence over twenty years ago, on November 13th 2004 at the Teatro della Pergola, during the Amici della Musica season. He then returned in 2008 for a duo concert with pianist Kathryn Stott.

At the center of the program are three pillars of the cello repertoire: the Suites no. 1 BWV 1007, no. 3 BWV 1009 and no. 6 BWV 1012 by Johann Sebastian Bach, of which Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most important interpreters of all time. Three compositions that have accompanied Yo-Yo Ma's entire career, performed and recorded on disc in 1983, 1997 and 2018 and soon became a true reference model.

The three Bach Suites are accompanied by “Summer in the High Grassland” by Chinese composer Zhao Jiping; the “Partita op.31” by Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, which was composed on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of Friedrich Schiller; and the “Sonata for solo cello” by American George Crumb, written in 1955.

Yo-Yo Ma began studying the cello with his father at the age of four and three years later moved with his family to New York, where he continued his studies at the Juilliard School before undertaking a course of humanities studies at Harvard.

He has received numerous major awards, including the 2001 National Medal of the Arts, the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors, the 2012 Polar Music Prize, and the 2022 Birgit Nilsson Award. He has performed for nine U.S. presidents, most recently at the inauguration of former President Joe Biden.

His extensive discography includes over 120 albums (19 of them Grammy Award winners) that range from iconic interpretations of Western classical repertoire to recordings that defy classification, such as Hush with Bobby McFerrin and The Goat Rodeo Sessions with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. His most recent releases include Six Evolutions, his third recording of Bach’s cello suites, and Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97 Archduke, the third volume in a new Beethoven series. Most recently, he initiated Our Common Nature, a cultural journey celebrating the ways nature can bring us together to build a shared future. Our Common Nature follows the Bach Project, a tour of Bach’s cello suites in 36 communities across six continents, accompanied by local cultural activities.

In addition to his extensive musical career, Yo-Yo is a United Nations Messenger of Peace, the first artist appointed to the board of the World Economic Forum, a board member of Nia Tero — a U.S. nonprofit working in solidarity with indigenous peoples and movements around the world — and the founder of the global music collective Silkroad.