As part of its 60th anniversary season, UCSB Arts & Lectures did more than just present an affecting performance by the 2016 Grammy-winning Silkroad Ensemble on April 26 at the Granada Theatre.

Arts & Lectures had also co-commissioned the work Heroes Take Their Stand along with UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances, Philharmonic Society of Orange County and the Kennedy Center, which Silkroad developed at The Juilliard School and Rice University.

In 1998, legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma conceived Silkroad Ensemble as a model of cultural collaboration in a global society, “to bring together artists from around the world to create music that engages their many traditions.”

The program notes open with a quote from Heroes creator Ahmad Sadri, “To live successfully in a cosmopolitan society, we must develop skills to see another’s culture as our own.”

With pedigree and vision like that, the work was certain to engage the intellect and the spirit with musical styles spanning the historic silk road, from China and Japan through India and Iran to Europe.

And it did.

The five works in the performance gather around a theme of humans making choices in the face of injustice, exercising ethical behavior when it goes against the social grain and thinking independently when loyalty is at stake.

Each piece highlights that heroes are not blessed with super powers, but rather are ordinary people who make choices at critical junctures in time, choices often fraught with uncertainty and risk.

The musicians performed each of five pieces in front of diverse, artistic, and potent video works, from calligraphy to holographic images of giant human forms towering over expansive desert landscapes.

Animations began each work with words or quotes that set the stage for a dilemma or challenge in which a hero would be called to stand apart. The works recalled Persian and Chinese myths, African American history, Greek tragedy and a Hindu epic.

The ensemble boasts 14 master musicians from a wide spectrum of traditions, and while each tradition retains a unique and distinctive voice in the ensemble, they also make harmonious friends and neighbors.

Taiko drums and tabla, violins and the Iranian bowed string instrument kemancheh, Japanese bamboo flute shakuhachi and Galician bagpipes.

European stringed stand-bys violin, viola, cello and bass shared moments on stage with a reverberant Chinese reed instrument, sheng, which sounds rural and folksy and street at the same time.

While the 14 musicians each provided moments of inspiration and awe, I have to single out Wu Man’s rapid, articulate plucking on the pipa (“Chinese lute”). Certainly while solo, but also in concert with more beefy instruments, the pipa stood out as a clear, delicate and complex voice.

An unexpected highlight was Bharatanatyam dancer-choreographer Aparna Ramaswamy’s portrayal of parts of the Bhagavad Gita. Her substantive solo was captivating with articulation in arm, hands and fingers that portrayed tying up hair and donning jewelry, fighting war and plucking fruit from a tree, gracefully and eloquently.

The sum of musical and thematic parts you might not expect to converge on a single stage, with the video and dance enriching it all, offered Silkroad’s eager audience sublime rewards.

In conjunction with the performance of Heroes, Arts & Lectures presented Ma in a lecture titled Culture, Understanding and Survival in which he discussed his career-long belief that culture can help us imagine and build a better future and his work to make it happen, along with a master class with UCSB students that was open to public observation.

— Judith Smith-Meyer.