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Entertainment
Live musical recitals breed camaraderie
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After her experience at the Edinburgh Festival 2002, GOWRI RAMNARAYAN feels that musical festivals make listening a community rite, for it provides an ambience which cannot ever be replicated elsewhere.
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Kungsbacka Trio.
IN OUR digital era, every kind of music, whether familiar or remote, can be accessed within the home. Such recordings may even present your choice with better sound quality than music halls and theatres. But CD/net technology has not diminished the impact of live performances. This is true even in India, where arrangements may be ad hoc, conditions ungeared to comfort, acoustics indoors and out often recalcitrant. Still, Vishnu Digambar Samaroh (New Delhi), Surya Festival (Trivandrum), Dover Lane (Calcutta), or the Madras ``music season'' continue to attract crowds.
Festivals breed camaraderie, and listening becomes a community rite. For locals as well as NRI and foreign visitors, the festival provides an ambience, which cannot ever be replicated elsewhere.
For the Indian, a major performing arts festival in the West — as the Edinburgh Festival 2002 — can be equally a matter of ambience seeking. The 150/200 strong orchestra is a dazzling spectacle, while even the smaller ensembles astonish by the sheer purity of sound. Halls are mikeless, music friendly, acoustics perfect, musicians play with the ease of familiar ground. And yes, there is bonding among the `regulars'.
What awes the visitor from the subcontinent is the audience discipline. Whether newcomers or connoisseurs, they shut out the world in their phenomenal absorption. Even breathing is controlled; coughs, sniffs, shufflings and page turning are confined to the breaks between the movements.
In one respect the Edinburgh situation was reminiscent of the Indian: the quality of music was more assured than that of theatre and dance. So you began the day with morning chamber recitals at The Queen's Hall and reached home well past midnight, overwhelmed by the flamboyance of grand orchestras at the Usher Hall. The latter were the series of 25 concerts, at five pounds per seat, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, to make classical music affordable for all. Pity the bargain was confined to this year, especially as it succeeded in wooing younger people.
In the five-pound concerts, for sheer jauntiness, it was hard to beat the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's "Gran Partita". Imagine the visual impact of pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, a double bass and four natural horns! Mozart makes 13 wind instruments dance across seven movements in shifting rhythms and rainbow sprays. The conductor, Sir Charles Mackerras, flowed with the youthful Serenade of leaping torrents, glowing pools and shy birdcalls. For the Indian listener, the impeccable tuning of the wind instruments was in itself a feat of wonder.
Janacek String Quarter.
The bonus at the festival was the variety and plenitude. They made you aware of the changing approaches to the treatment of emotion in composers belonging to different times and climes — whether Beethoven (1770-1827) or Stravinsky (1882-1971). The contrasts made you recognise the socio-political influences on the creative mind.
The Czech composers had unique flavours — Smetana (String Quartet No 2 in D Minor), Janacek (The Kreutzer Sonata which draws from Beethoven and Tolstoy) and Dvorak (String Quartet no 14 in G Op 1060), performed by the Janacek String Quartet — Milos Vacek/ Viteslav Zavadilik (violins); Ladislav Kyselak (viola), Breteslav Vibiral (cello). Dramatic, operatic, ricocheting with unexpected rhythms, they pulled you to the edge of your seat. Nor was it a surprise to learn that Smetana was afflicted with deafness and syphilis as he struggled to express his personal conflicts through the quartet played that morning.
Wrenching gloom marked his Piano Trio in G minor Op 15, presented by the Kungsbacka Trio of violin (Malin Broman), cello (Jesper Svedberg) and piano (Simon Crawford-Phillips). The three movements climaxed in grief sans catharsis. The anguish was greater for being placed between Haydn's lyrical pastoral, which includes a village band tuning up; and Schubert's dark moments melting into the stirring finale.
Sense of timing and intuitive co-ordination marked "Composer's Ensemble" (woodwind and brass), who began with Carl Nielson's "Wind Quintet", with its evocative, memorable parts for each instrument, and so visual that you glide through blue-green grotto lights playing on shadows and echoes. Humour sparkled in Stravinsky's musical joke between two bassoons. His Octet drew its drive from a pithy, laconic, objectivity.
Often the stage brought people you knew as names on record jackets, as when Eric Le Sage (piano), David Pyatt (horn) and Gordan Nikolitch (violin) presented the classical composers (with an Elegie by Poulenc which did not take off).
A fine balance in Schumann and a demanding Brahms, while Beethoven's Horn sonata, the first piece ever written for horn and piano (1800) was rendered with reverberant zest.
These Queen's Hall recitals made you wonder why Indian festivals of Carnatic and Hindustani music do not include such trios and quartets in their series.
Our auditoria cannot accommodate grand orchestras, but the great heritage of the West can be accessed through smaller ensembles.
In fact, they can introduce compositions reflecting personal moods from the agonised to the playful, and therefore be of special interest to listeners here who are used to the personalised improvisation of Indian music. Featured in the Madras Music festival or the Sawai Gandharva festival, they will draw discerning listeners who may not attend such programmes when organised in isolation by some foreign cultural institute or the ICCR.
The venture will surely promote a genuine East-West encounter among the musicians. It may attract the young to the classical music scene. Why not? After all, that is what happened in Edinburgh when the Scottish festival featured Hariprasad Chaurasia, Amjad Ali Khan and Shruti Sadolikar in an All Night Raga session!
Canine Connoisseur
CONCERT HALLS at the Edinburgh festival seem to welcome canine patrons. Not the guides of blind or physically handicapped people, but large, shaggy hounds, sitting on their haunches beside their fond owners. A saucy peke was ensconsced on his mistress's lap.
A Scottish neighbour in my row explained that with divorces, and deaths of partners, lonely senior citizens became so attached to their dogs that they could not bear to be separated from them. In the foyer, a woman disclosed that her Labrador liked Brahms.
``No tickets for dogs,'' press officer James Allenby chuckled, as he recalled how once, a woman ticket buyer brought a veterinarian's certificate stating that her dog would be psychologically disturbed if it was separated from her. ``So I had to accommodate both of them in seats from where they wouldn't frighten other listeners. The dog was huge, but the lady was redoubtable!'' — GR
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