Music Season 2015: What stayed in mind and what didn’t

Wow! What a Season! 

It began bad with the rude, offensive, invidious and illogical ranting by carnatic music’s Natakapriya, T M Krishna, but turned out to be damn good. TMK’s sentiments may be noble, but his choice of words – such as, ‘vulgar’ and ‘insensitive’ -- to describe those who hold or attend concerts, is in very poor taste and reflects poorly on the man. But what else can one expect from a man who praises himself to the high skies in his own website (“Krishna’s pen is sharp, his words blunt”, he says)? Anyway, when he was busy elsewhere doing whatever (such as endeavouring to force-convert slum dwellers into carnatic connoisseurs) the 2015 Season went very well.

My participation was rather modest. I went to some 25 concerts, reported for The Hindu on six of them, wrote an article on the paradigm shift from bhakti-oriented to intellectual music, ate in several canteens….happy times.

But of all the music across the 25-odd concerts I went to, the one that has remained stuck in my mind – it is indelible, I guess – is Malladi Brothers’ Kiravani in the concert for Narada Gana Sabha. And the one that I remember for wrong reasons is Abishek Raghuram’s Mayamalavagowlai in his concert for Brahma Gana Sabha.

These two pieces of music represent opposite positions in carnatic music of today, everything lies in between. But why are they the opposite positions?

The one that did - KeeraWOWni !!!!!!!!

Malladi Sreeramprasad’s Kiravani, meant to be an ode to the Chennai flood victims, was slow, leisurely, deep, emotive, meditative – like the slow but sure spread of fragrance in a hall. It was joyful. It gave peace. It soothed frayed nerves, relaxed the listener. But it was not particularly imaginative. The brothers did not attempt to ride on their manodharma vehicle into unexplored territories of the raga, but they sailed peacefully like a boat in a placid summer lake. Their pallavi, ‘panchabhuta shantim dehi parameswara karunaya’, sounded every bit like what it was meant to be—a plea to the Lord for harmony with Nature.

I juxtaposed the recording with many other Kiravanis, including the Hindustani Kirwani, in order to try and find out what it else it resembled the most. The closest was Sitarist Brigitte Menon’s Kirwani, and the next was Pandit Shivkumar Sharma’s.

The one that didn’t – the ‘10,000-wala’  mayamalavagowlai

Abishek Raghuram is a guy you can bet every single rupee you have on his becoming a Sangita Kalanidhi some day. He is the man who will carry the torch from Sanjay Subramanian for the dam-burst kind of manodharma music, a torch that Sanjay himself seems to have picked up from Seshagopalan. (Whom did Sesha take it from? GNB? Balamurali?) Abishek is the kind of carnatic musician who starts off, and helplessly goes into auto-pilot. Something within him takes over, and then, he is just an instrument…no, not even that…just a, say, loudspeaker….and the music comes from some hidden well deep within. A brilliant artiste.

But….

But he is too much of a vocal acrobat. Hear him sing gives you the same experience as watching a bunch of monkeys on a tree, wildly swinging from branch to branch. Too much of imagination, to the complete abrogation of aesthetics, sense of proportion…makes Abishek, after some time, a bore.

All he needs to do is to realise this.

Flashback

Many, many years back, Seshagopalan, in a concert in Shastri Hall, Mylapore, sang the lines ‘Sree Subramanyaya Namaste, manasija koti koti lavanyaya deena shranyaya’ some 25 times after nereval and swaras were over. Just the lines, over and over again! It turned out to be extremely tiring.

The next day, T M A Raman, then a journalist with Financial Express and an ardent carnatic fan – today he writes regularly for Carnatic Durbar – bumped into Seshagopalan, and told him, “Sir, neythiki romba paduthitinga sir.”

“Aama, sir, you are right,” agreed Sesha.

My fear is, Abishek might turn out to be something of Sesha’s music of that evening. My friend S Sivaramakrishnan and I will remember Abishek’s Brahma Gana Sabha’s concert in December 2015 for wrong reasons.

Between the Malladi Kiravani and Abishek’s Mayamalavagowlai seems to lie the sea of carnatic music.

Truly, it is like a food court. There are various dishes on offer, you take what you want. There is nothing that can be called ‘wrong’. But it does seem that the ‘instant gratification’ variety is more on offer than the healthy.