Chicago Tyagaraja Uthsavam

Concerts and other events related to CM.
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manvantara
Posts: 64
Joined: 04 Apr 2008, 01:10

Post by manvantara »

I had a chance to attend some of the concerts at the Chicago Tyagaraja Uthsavam (http://tyagaraja-chicago.org/).
I attended the concert of T.M.Krishna, Aruna Sayeeram and part of the Gundecha brothers' concert.

I do not have a list of the kritis presented, but here are some thoughts:

Concert of T.M.Krishna: Overall enjoyable, but at various points, Krishna seems to resort to some gimmickry - there were times when he sang so softly that he was barely audible and a few minutes later, he sang so loudly that I felt as if he was angry and shouting at someone! This did not, in any way, add to the presentation - in fact, it made it a bit annoying.
The main raga was thodi and the kriti was "Jesina-dellama" - my personal opinion is that he sang the sangatis too fast and it seemed as if all the swaras were jammed together at high speed! The "sowkhyam" aspect was completely absent.

Aruna Sayeeram's concert: She started off with a very meditative piece - a rendering of a shloka, and then ever so slowly glided into music. It was lovely.
Mid-way, she told us about her new CD, recorded and marketed by an American company and told us it was available for sale and said she'd re-start the concert in 5 minutes. That was a complete disaster as the 5 minute break stretched to 20 minutes. (it is just not possible to expect 300+ people to get back to their seats in 5 minutes!).

Concert of the Gundecha brothers: By far, this was the best of the three that I could attend!
Initially, they took their time tuning the tamburas, apologising for it and explaining that the temperature differences kept changing the shruti.
Once they started their concert, it was pure bliss - the brothers alternated in their alap phrases and one could never find out who was singing - so perfect was their shruti alignment and the way they took off from each phrase. I have never heard anyone sing so clearly in so many octaves! (I am not good at explaining this, but let me try: from their regular S, P,S, they were able to sing the lower S and the P below that S! On the higher side, I heard them go up to S very clearly and come back fine). All this done with no gimmickry. There was one piece on Devi, (the raga was announced as Siva Ranjani) that was outstanding. On the whole, I felt very meditative hearing them sing and it was a mood that I did not want to get out of.:)

Sorry, I do not have kriti list nor information about the other concerts, but I look forward to inputs from other rasikas.
Also, there are other aspects of the Uthsavam that I'd like to write about (audience discipline, for one), but I will touch on that a bit later.

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