Yo-Yo Ma, Golijov highlight ASO’s Latin festival

Before you start singing “It’s a Small World After All” —- before you understand how a pre-Columbian empire links the Jewish diaspora in Argentina to Peru’s Machu Picchu and to modern Atlanta via a Chinese cellist born in Paris —- you should know a little about the Silk Road Project.

The Silk Road Project uses music to introduce the ancient trade route that linked China in the Far East with the Mediterranean world in the Near East. Headlined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma —- family from China, born in France —- the Silk Road Project started as a sort of traveling festival. Sexy and sophisticated, it was a massive hit that tapped the zeitgeist of multiculturalism, world music and ethnic empowerment. The project is now a permanent institution of tours, recordings and a lot of great music and related arts.

Enter conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, music director of the Fort Worth Symphony in Texas. A native of Peru, he knew of his own historic culture’s fabulous riches. Two years ago, he developed “Caminos del Inka,” a musical introduction to the cultures once linked together by the Inca Trail.

Harth-Bedoya and his “Inka” program —- already performed in Fort Worth, Chicago, Baltimore —- come to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as the opening of the ASO’s Musica Ardiente! Festival (May 28 and 30).

The festival is centered on classical and popular music from Latin America. There will also be projected images of the Inca Trail by Peruvian photographer Fabiana Van Lente, who now lives in Texas.

The second weekend, June 4-6, tracks South American popular and folk-inspired music with a program called “Tango, Fados and Dance!” and includes dancers on stage and the soulful Brazilian-American chanteuse Luciana Souza.

The festival headliner is the ubiquitous cellist Ma, who’ll perform one night only, May 29, and play a piece written for him: Osvaldo Golijov’s “Azul.”

With ASO performances of his opera “Ainadamar” and his cantata “La Pasion Segun San Marcos,” Golijov is perhaps the most beloved and applauded composer to ever walk on the Symphony Hall stage. A native of Argentina, from an Orthodox Jewish family, his sound is both familiar and unique, with Latin dance rhythms propelling Verdi-style lyricism and tinged with Yiddish-folk harmonies. He lives in Massachusetts and is in demand everywhere.

“Yo-Yo has done everything as a cellist; he’s got nothing to prove,” Golijov says about “Azul,” which Ma premiered in 2006 with the Boston Symphony. “So instead of a heroic concerto, I went somewhere musically I’ve never been. There’s a lot of activity, but it’s almost all in slow motion, all fluid motion.”

A modest and sometimes poetic man, Golijov calls the 27-minute “Azul” “the most substantial thing I’ve ever written. It’s the blue night, like a bird in the blue night, and the cello represents to me the wings of that soaring bird.”