The Italian cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima is a friend and colleague of both Ma and Stott. (He collaborates with Ma’s Silk Road Project, for example.) He is a post-minimalist composer of typically eclectic influences, and scored Il bell’Antonio, a 2005 remake for Italian television of the 1960 film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale. Ma and Stott included the brooding modal loneliness of Tema III from that score on Songs from the Arc of Life.