This release celebrates and commemorates Yo-Yo Ma's 30 year recording career with Sony Music. Created with the full participation of Yo-Yo Ma, 30 Years Outside the Box, is the definitive collection of this iconic artist. The box set contains every original album Yo-Yo Ma has recorded including 2 discs of rare and never before released material, a 312-page hard bound book with complete liners notes all housed in an elegant velvet-lined, numbered box.

Yo-Yo Ma: 30 Years Outside the Box, is a deluxe box set of Yo-Yo Ma's recorded legacy. This elaborate, numbered limited-edition box celebrates Yo-Yo Ma’s 30th anniversary with the label. Yo-Yo Ma: 30 Years Outside the Box is the definitive collection of this iconic artist in a presentation as beautiful and timeless as the music itself.

Special packaging:
Yo-Yo Ma: 30 Years Outside the Box is being presented in a unique, beautifully designed, Casemade, velvet lined, lift off box. All discs are packaged in original jacket style minijackets highlighting original album cover art and complete track listings.

The Music in this collection:
The recorded history of Yo-Yo Ma in one box. 90 CDs: Eighty eight discs of original album releases (including 15 Grammy Award® winners) plus an additional two discs of bonus material – entirely remastered with DSD technology.

Over the past 30 years, Yo-Yo Ma has made several successful recordings that defy categorization, among them Hush with Bobby McFerrin, Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer and two Grammy® winning tributes to the music of Brazil, Obrigado Brazil and Obrigado Brazil Live In Concert. YoYo Ma’s most recent recordings include New Impossibilities, a live album recorded with the Silk Road Ensemble and Songs of Joy & Peace, a collaborative recording released last year which has become the best selling album of his 30 year recording career. The Bonus Discs include the first release in any format of John Williams’ Suite from Memoirs of a Geisha for Cello and Orchestra. The second disc includes the first compact disc release of his “Air and Simple Gifts,” written for the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Hardbound book:
Unique to this box set is a 312 page hard bound book with rare archival photos, essays, artist bios, full track lists, original liner notes, and credits. The book’s foreword is by longtime Yo-Yo Ma collaborator and Grammy® winning pianist Emanuel Ax. The main essay, focusing on Mr. Ma’s multifaceted, boundary defying career, is by noted music journalist Richard Dyer. In addition, there are short essays about the recordings from Yo-Yo Ma’s main producer Steven Epstein and Composer John Williams. The book also features “A Life In Pictures,” a chronological photographic portrait of Yo-Yo Ma’s life and career with over 150 rare, archival photos complimented with messages from many of Yo Yo Ma’s friends and colleagues including the late Senator Ted Kennedy, James Taylor, Alan Alda, Alison Krauss, Dave Brubeck, Ennio Morricone, Jaime Laredo, Wynton Marsalis, Stephen Colbert and many more.

R E V I E W:

I wasn’t very familiar with Yo-Yo Ma’s work before getting this set, other than having heard his recording of Bach’s cello suites. I took advantage of a “lightning sale” at Amazon Fr to grab this set a few weeks ago at the very low price of €140 (about $190), or less than half the current price on Amazon US. I note that some third-party sellers have it for around $300, but the Amazon US price at the time of this writing is $472. To be honest, the list price for this box is well above what one expects to pay for that many CDs in the big classical box sets we’ve been seeing recently. This is probably why Amazon Fr got a bunch of the sets to put them on sale. It’s worth noting that this is a limited edition, and even though it was released in October 2009, it has not sold 7,500 copies. A certificate in the box tells me I have # 6464/7500.

Like Sony’s other recent big boxes - such as the Murray Perahia set and the Glenn Gould Complete Bach Edition, this contains CDs in wallets with original artwork and the backs of original LPs in tiny fonts. There is a hardcover book, very attractive, on glossy paper, with essays, photos and album notes. Sony has this down pat; while the three sets I mention are all different, with different numbers of discs, and different sized books (to fit in the appropriate boxes), the presentation of all these sets is excellent.

As for the music, Ma covers a wide range of the classical and non-classical repertoire. From chamber music to orchestral music, he gives an overview of the entire span of cello music, but also veers off in other directions, with a disc of Japanese Melodies, a Claude Bolling disc, and his “crossover” recordings, such as Appalachia Waltz, his Silk Road recordings, and some movie soundtracks, such as for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Seven Years in Tibet.

Ma is an excellent cellist, and he is never boring, though many of these works can be found in versions that are better. For example, his Schubert String Quintet lacks the pathos of better versions, and his first Bach cello suite recording is somewhat bland; his second recording is much better. Nevertheless, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by so much of this music as I have been listening to the set, and have discovered many works I’m not familiar with.

I wouldn’t suggest paying the full price, unless you’re an unconditional fan of Yo-Yo Ma - in which case you probably already have the set - but if you can get it at a price similar to what I paid, I’d say it’s well worth the investment.

-- Kirk McElhearn, MusicWeb International