His recent initiatives include a world tour of J.S. Bach’s suites for solo cello designed to explore culture’s role in creating trust, and Our Common Nature, a cultural journey celebrating the ways that culture can reconnect us to the natural world. Both endeavors reflect Yo-Yo’s lifelong commitment to stretching the boundaries of genre and tradition to understand how music helps us to imagine and build a stronger society.
Yo-Yo was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris. He began to study cello with his father at age four and three years later moved with his family to New York City, where he continued his studies at the Juilliard School before pursuing a liberal arts education at Harvard.
He has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010), Kennedy Center Honors (2011), the Polar Music Prize (2012), and the Birgit Nilsson Prize (2022). Yo-Yo is a United Nations Messenger of Peace, the first artist ever appointed to the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees, a board member of the US-based nonprofit Nia Tero working in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and movements worldwide, and the founder of the global music collective Silkroad. He has performed for nine American presidents, most recently on the occasion of President Biden’s inauguration.
His discography of more than 120 albums (including 20 Grammy winners) ranges from iconic interpretations of the Western classical canon to recordings that defy categorization, such as “Hush” with Bobby McFerrin and the “Goat Rodeo Sessions” with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. Yo-Yo’s recent releases include “Six Evolutions,” his third recording of Bach’s cello suites; “Merci” with pianist Kathryn Stott; and “Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 1 / Op. 70, No. 1 ‘Ghost’ / Op. 11 ‘Gassenhauer,’” the fourth in a series of Beethoven recordings with pianist Emanuel Ax and violinist Leonidas Kavakos.
Yo-Yo and his wife have two children. He plays four cellos: two modern instruments by Moes & Moes, a 1733 Montagnana from Venice, and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius.
