Rhiannon Giddens & Yo-Yo Ma in New York

Rhiannon Giddens is an American singer, songwriter, banjo player and fiddler, born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1977. She co-founded the old-time string band Carolina Chocolate Drops and later built a solo catalogue rooted in folk, blues and country traditions. Her major works include the albums Tomorrow Is My Turn, Freedom Highway and You're the One, as well as the opera Omar, written with Michael Abels. Rhiannon Giddens toured internationally with Carolina Chocolate Drops, and in 2011 the group opened a run of US concerts for Bob Dylan. She played Newport Folk Festival as a solo artist in 2015, then toured material from there is no Other and They're Calling Me Home in a duo with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi.

Yo-Yo Ma is an American cellist, born in Paris in 1955 and raised in New York. His repertoire extends across Baroque music, the standard cello concertos, chamber music and contemporary works. He is particularly associated with Bach’s six Cello Suites, which he has recorded several times, and with collaborative albums including Hush with Bobby McFerrin, Appalachia Waltz with Edgar Meyer and The Goat Rodeo Sessions. In 1962, the seven-year-old Ma performed for President John F. Kennedy at a televised cultural event in Washington, where Leonard Bernstein introduced him. After decades of recitals and concerto engagements, he founded the Silk Road Project in 1998; its musicians began workshops at Tanglewood in 2000 and later toured as the Silkroad Ensemble. The Bach Project, launched in 2018, included complete performances of the cello suites at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens and Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. He gives solo recitals at Carnegie Hall and joins orchestras for concerto performances at Symphony Hall in Boston.