India Trip Round Up
Well, after over a month's absence posting here, I finally decided to put together a brief round up of my trip to India. The trip went very well. I had a good mix of personal practice time and concerts among other things. I even got to catch the latest Batman film, "Dark Knight" a couple days before I left. Definitely a dark and chilling film.
I was very happy to spend some quality time with my guru, Dr. Kadri Gopalnath. I was also able to catch up with some friends, mentors and other musicians who I usually spend time with, such as T.R. Subramaniam, A. Kanyakumari, Guruvayur Dorai, V. Suresh, Ganeshprasad among others. This time, it was a treat to perform with B.U. Ganeshprasad (violin), Trichur Narendran (mridangam), Phalgun (mridangam), and V. Suresh during my concerts among others.As I mentioned in my earlier post, my first concert of the trip was at Rameswaram. Rameswaram has an interesting history, mainly because of the religious background. Myself, Ganeshprasad and Phalgun did a morning concert there after a long a night train. It was a part of a three day Gurupurnima event. A video was taken, but as usual, I never find time to upload. I will do it soon enough. Here is a screen grab from the video I have...
After Rameswaram and Thiruvunamalai, I had a concert at a new hall in Chennai called Sri Muthu Venkata Subba Rao Memorial Hall. Quite a long name. I can say that I was extremely impressed with the hall. I think it is the best hall in Chennai. The concert was curated by the hall's programming director and sponsored by a company there called Gatsby. It was definitely a crowd different from the usual Carnatic listeners, but the response was very good and it was a pleasure to play in a quality environment and ambience focused purely on the music. The whole thing was recorded, both audio and video, so hopefully I will share some of that with you soon. That concert had myself on saxophone, B.U. Ganeshprasad, Trichur Narendran on mridangam and V. Suresh on ghatam.The concert brought with it a number of press articles of all types. I haven't received a copy of them all, but here are some links to the ones I heard about so far. If you want to get the latest, probably check back on my press page. If you find anything that is not there yet, let me know.
- "Strict Adherence to Classicism" - Concert review in The Hindu by Lalitha Krishnan
- "When East Meets West" - An article in a The Hindu supplement called "NXG"
- "Carnatic Music Gets a Saxy Makeover" - Article in a Hindu magazine called "Ergo."
- "Unchained Melody" - Article in India Today magazine: Online Version | E-Magazine Version
- Interview in "The Score" music magazine: Online | PDF | Photo (jpg)
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