Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma performs in Knoxville this week. Here’s how to get tickets

Devarrick Turner, Knoxville News Sentinel
·2 min read
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World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma will perform in World’s Fair Park this week, and he’s bringing a host of other artists with him to celebrate Appalachian culture and lift the region’s Indigenous, European, Latinx and Black voices.

Ma is scheduled to perform at 8 p.m. May 26 as the main event of the “Our Common Nature: An Appalachian Celebration,” a cultural festival taking place May 25-27 in Knoxville, presented by Big Ears, Knoxville's tentpole music festival.

Ma will be joined by guest musicians, dancers and storytellers to create a unique, multilayered concert experience.

General admission tickets still can be purchased online at ourcommonnature.org. Tickets begin at $50, and festivalgoers can arrive at 5 p.m.

The festival will highlight cultural traditions and the natural beauty through food, poetry, storytelling, art, music and dance. Musicians Rhiannon Giddens, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer will perform with Ma, along with local performers.

Thile also will perform May 25 at the Bijou Theatre, and Giddens will play the venue May 27. Any remaining tickets for their shows are available at ourcommonnature.org.

Celebrating the connection between culture and nature

“Our Common Nature” is a multiyear, multi-location cultural project by Yo-Yo Ma that is a “celebration of the ways nature can reinvigorate the human experiment, reuniting us in pursuit of a common future,” according to the website.

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma will headline "Our Common Nature: An Appalachian Celebration,” a cultural festival being presented in association with Big Ears. Yo-Yo Ma will be perform alongside other artists in World's Fair Park May 26, 2023.
World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma will headline "Our Common Nature: An Appalachian Celebration,” a cultural festival being presented in association with Big Ears. Yo-Yo Ma will be perform alongside other artists in World's Fair Park May 26, 2023.

This week’s event is a partnership by Ma and Big Ears Festival founder Ashley Capps. The two began planning the event in 2022.

"Last May, I visited the Great Smoky Mountains, and I fell in love," Ma said in January when the event was announced. "What I realized was to fall in love with the beauty and complexity of the region is to fall in love all over again with the soul of America.”

"Yo-Yo has quite an expansive vision, and this is step one of realizing that vision of bringing people together, communities together, to explore our common nature and our relationship to the natural world, which is why the Smoky Mountains connection is so important,” Capps added at the January announcement.

Ma also has hosted “Our Common Nature” events in Maine and Hawaii.

Devarrick Turner is a trending news reporter. Email devarrick.turner@knoxnews.com. Twitter @dturner1208.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Big Ears presents cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Knoxville music festival