VAIL, Colorado — The day is here.

The 23rd season of the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival opens unlike any of its 22 predecessors as cellist Yo-Yo Ma begins the season with a recital, a self-described “short trip around a few hemispheres” ranging from the traditional (Brahms and Rachmaninoff) to the modern (Gershwin, Ennio Morricone, Graham Fitkin, and Cesar Camargo Mariano), at the Ford Amphitheater at 6 p.m.

And the Vail Valley music community is buzzing.

“One word: Passion. Absolute passion, and he just oozes passion when he plays and you can just see it,” said Evergreeen's Katherine Bellino, a 15-year-old, who will be accompanying Yo-Yo Ma during Saturday's Imagination Celebration event on Saturday, also at Vail. “It just shows not only is he phenomenal, but he loves music and loves the music that he plays.”

Bravo! artistic director Eugenia Zukerman, who's known Ma, 54, since he was 18, has been hoping to get the best-known cellist to Vail for the 13 seasons of her tenure and now the moment's here.

“I have known Yo-Yo for more than 30 years, and with all his accolades and fame, he has remained the approachable and modest person he was in his late teens,” she said. “To hear him play in person is to be transported — don't miss the journey.”

Beginnings and a journey

Ma's voyage through his career is a storied one. At all of 7, he performed for presidents John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. In the early 1960s, e was back in Washington D.C. in 2009, playing at President Barack Obama's inauguration.

In between, he's done everything from perform with Canadian prime minister Steven Harper — they did the Beatles' “With a Little Help from my Friends” — to TV shows like “The West Wing” (playing himself at a Christmas party) and even “The Colbert Report” to a much-acclaimed duet in 2001 with then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, herself an accomplished musician when not involved in the worlds of academia and politics.

The eclectic nature of locale and style of Ma's music is his mission.

“I think that, in a way, experiencing the making of things, whether it's a dance, or combining sounds, the purpose of all of that is not only self-expression, but it's passion and curiosity building,” Ma said in a recent interview with the Vail Daily.

His recent endeavor is the Silk Road Project started in 1998. Based on the actual trading route between East and West in history, it emphasizes a flow of artistic ideas on this now metaphorical road.

The Silk Road Project involved him in Azerbaijani opera, residencies all over the world from Japan to North America with the Silk Road Ensemble to educational outreach programs, even at New York City's Museum of Natural History.

“”We celebrated with all 450 students in The Whale Room at the Museum of Natural History, incredible,” said Damian Woetzel, who knows Ma through President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. “The schools each performed demonstrations, inspired by elements from the school year. There were dances and music and theater and more. Yo-Yo emceed and he and the Silk Road Ensemble accompanied the kids in their presentations and performed special pieces arranged for the occasion.”

The program

Tonight's concert reflects Ma's range. Morricone's “Gabriel's Oboe” from the movie, “The Mission” was originally written for oboe. Ma transcribes it to the cello.

From the silver screen, New York of the first half of the 20th Century is the next stop with Gershwin's “Prelude No. 2.” Again, this is not a piece written for the cello. It's a piano piece, but this keeps in Ma's theme of broadening borders.

“Gershwin, in so many ways, is a hybrid of different cultures — native-American culture, African-based culture,” Ma said.

What follows is the natural transition from Gershwin to jazz with Cesar Camargo Mariano's “Cristal.”

Then, it's time for more traditional fare in Brahms' “Sonata No. 1.”

“Brahms is one of the golden-period composers that best represents the idea that you can you can hear a piece of music and you can represent one person with a matching world view,” Ma said.

Composer Graham Fitkin wrote the piece “L” for Ma's 50th birthday and the evening concludes with Rachmaninoff's “Sonata in G Minor.”

The mixture of old and new in tonight's program illustrates his believe that classical music can still grow and thrive.

“I like living composers,” he said. “Anything that doesn't grow, dies. Every tradition is invented, and is a result of a successful invention. If you just want to keep the tradition the same, it will get smaller all the time.”