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Myriads of musical strains

Baruipur’s Ramnagar Uttarbhag wears a festive look every year during the second half of January, thanks to the several days…

Myriads of musical strains

Baruipur’s Ramnagar Uttarbhag wears a festive look every year during the second half of January, thanks to the several days long Satyananda Mela, organised by Sree Satyananda Mahapeeth. The clarion call, originating from this divine institution under the guidance of Sree Archanapuri Maa and her devoted disciple Swami Mrigananda, actually inspires all the artistes and craftsmen to showcase their art and craft during this fair focused on Bengal’s cultural heritage. This noble effort to bring this remote corner of the metro under the mainstream, receives generous support from the West Bengal government, from reputed artistes as well as from all segments of the local social groups.

This year the Mela commenced with a musical feature, scripted, tuned, directed and originally sung by Archanapuri Maa who, like her spiritual Guru Thakur Satyananda Dev, believes in educating the masses through captivating cultural shows. To this effect, she has scripted numerous musical features.

Well-known classical vocalist and guru Nabhodeep Chakraborty and his students chose to perform one such captivating feature Sumbh Nisumbh Badh, which describes the victory of Goddess Durga over evil with songs, based on ragas like Devgiri Bilaval, Malgunji, Bhankar, Bhimpalsri, Bhupali, Vrindavani Sarang, Durga et al. Ably narrated by Sikha Chakraborty and sung by Asu Anvita Naidu, Samudranil Dhara, Shreya Ghosh, Sagnik Sen, Atasi Sarkar, Anisha Mondal Mukherjee, Vishwajeet Singh Thakur, Rajeswari Chakraborty, Avirup and Avijoy Saha under the guidance of Nabhodeep who trained them in the Patiala Gharana parampara, the feature was brought alive, especially when the guru joined them and made a memorable impact. They were supported by Somnath Saha, Ashish Goswami and Subhashish Chakraborty on the tabla, percussion and keyboard respectively.

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Each day of the Mela showcased different genres of performing arts. Apparently, the crowd pullers were the jatra palas, theatre groups, kirtan sampradaya, magic shows and interesting storytellers like the “human puppets”.

Classical debut

Sur Archana Sangeet Pratishthaan has been presenting annual cultural concerts for years. This was the first time that they organised a purely classical music concert in Belgharia’s Nazrul Mancha under the guidance of Archana Chakraborty, who is the founder of the organisation. The students of Sur Archana commenced the evening with a beautiful Saraswati vandana, which was followed by a bhajan.

However, renowned Hindustani classical vocalist Sandip Bhattacharjee and New York-based sitarist Indrajit Chowdhary were the main attraction of this melodious evening. While the latter was supported by Arindam Chakravarty (tabla), Dilip Biswas and Kingshuk Mukherjee accompanied Sandip on the harmonium and tabla very efficiently. Sandip presented raga Bageshree and mesmerised the audiences with alaap, vistaar, taan and sargam — all punctuated with emotive spells. Though time was limited, he presented the famous thumri, Yaad piya ki aye with beautiful artistry.

Earlier, the classical part began with raga Yaman, neatly sung by Shrijeeta Chakraborty. She rounded off with a Meera Bhajan (composed by Sandip). This was followed by vocalist Susmita Chakraborty’s melodious khayal recital in raga Ragheshri and a soulful Hori bhajan.? Kathak exponent Tandra Sar?bajna along with her co-artists began their recital with an invocation (Shiva stuti) in contemporary dance style and then went into traditional kathak. ?Their costumes and dancing skills was captivating.

150th birthday

The year-long celebration of the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Abhedananda commenced on his janma tithi on 24 September 2016 at the Satyananda Devayatan Hall under the aegis of Sree Satyananda Mahapeeth. As in the first two phases of the celebration, the third one also highlighted the vision and philosophy of the Swami’s life and mission. Spread over two days, it was organised at Sree Satyananda Vidyaniketan Hall, Baruipur.

The first day saw an enlightening seminar on “Relevance of Sanskrit and the Hindu Way of Life”. Moderated by Swami Shivatmananda, eminent scholars like Indrajit Sarkar, Ayan Bhattacharya, Parthsarathy Mukhopadhyay, Biplab Chakraborty and Shubhodeep Mukhopadhyay spoke on the subjects close to the heart of Abhed Swami.

Music too was one of his most revered subjects and the second day focused on that. Nabhodeep Chakraborty, representative of Kasur Patiala Gharana, started the afternoon recital with raga Bhimpalasi. As this concert was dedicated to Abhed Swami, the vilambit khayal in ektal and showed certain elements of Khandaharbani Dhrupad. The chalan of the raga displayed heavy meends without lighter embellishments. The lyrics of teental khayal were Saadh le man Hari ko, kar le dhyan tu Bramha ko. A Sanskrit composition of Adi Shankaracharya, Pashupatim Dyupatim Dharani-patim tuned in raga Malkauns was his next. A Bengali devotional song of Premik Maharaj, set to chautal completed this melodic tribute, well accompanied by Kamalaskha Mukherjee and Nabarun Kumar Dutta on the harmonium and tabla respectively.

This devotionally-charged mood reached its zenith when renowned kirtan exponent Shanta Das and Sampradaya took centre stage. The erudite singer said that worldly life introduces us to several people, this awakens emotions, which lead to love and when our loved one goes out of sight, we suffer the pangs of separation. This pain is the mainstay of Mathur-Leela, the core of her presentation of the day. After the traditional Gaurchandrika in raga Alhaiya Bilawal, she offered compositions of Vidyapati, Chandidas and Vasudev Ghosh Thakur set to Puria Dhanashri, Yaman et al. In the Akshep segment she sang an emotive Prem ka ankur set to raga Yaman Kalyan and tewra tala. Beautifully assisted all through by her daughter Shatarupa Das, she concluded with Dooti samvad in raga Bageshri.

Awesome quartet

The hallowed Tollygunge Clubs lawns witnessed a memorable evening of jazz and classical fusion featuring santoor maestro Tarun Bhattacharya and the much acclaimed US-based saxophone virtuoso George Brooks. They were ably supported by Joy Sarkar on the guitar and Pandit Shubhankar Banerjee on the tabla. The evening began with raga Kirwani replete with an elaborate alaap and gatkaris in jhaptal and teental. This was followed by a solo rendition by Brooks who played a western melody akin to raga Puriya Dhanashree.

Bhattacharya followed this with a dhun called Dreams and quickly moved on to another captivating raga Charukeshi. Brooks took over from there with his solo rendition of western melodies and finally the musicians played the famed Vaishnava jana toh taine kahiye, the favourite bhajan of Mahatma Gandhi. The enthralling music for over two hours was witnessed by a mammoth crowd of almost one thousand discerning music lovers.

North-South dialogue

Rasika Ranjana Sabha, Kolkata, is a premier organisation known for their regularly organised classical music concerts. They presented a rare vocal duet concert in Carnatic and Hindustani classical music styles recently.

This featured two very talented and upcoming artistes, Calcutta VN Shankar (a former Kolkata-resident now settled in Chennai) and Pallabi Ghatak. They started their concert with a shloka invoking blessings of Lord Ganesha followed by a composition set to interesting melodies of Mohana Kalayani (a Carnatic raga, having Bhupali and Yaman in arohan and avarohan respectively) in praise of Lord Siddhi Vinayaka in Aditala (composed by Harikesh Nalur Muthaiyabagwathar). Kudos to Pallabi, a disciple of Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty, for singing the composition in this raga as it is quite rare for the Hindustani system. She, then, presented raga Jog in the traditional way, replete with slow and fast khayals that were duly treated with vistar, behlawa and a variety of taans. She was ably assisted by one of most competent young tabla exponents today, Sandip Ghosh. Pallabi’s mellifluous voice did wonders in the higher octave with clear tone without any blemishes.

Next, Calcutta VN Shankar, who is groomed by PS Naryanaswamy Chennai belonging to the Semmangudi Bani, took up his solo presentation in the traditional Carnatic raga Shankarabaranam (the corresponding raga in Hindustani being Bilwal). He presented an elaborate alap that delineated this gambhira raga very effectively. He then sang one of the most popular kriti composed by Saint Thyagraja set in Aditala. He was ably followed on the violin by S Ranganthan, a student of the renowned Guruguha Gana Vidayalaya Kolkata. The kriti’s beauty was enhanced by the rhythmic support provided by the city-based well-known mridangam vidwan N Shankar.

After these solo presentations, both Shankar and Pallabi took up a duet. While Shankar followed the typical ragam Tanam Pallavi format, Pallabi followed the alap, taan and khayal bandish based design. They chose the conventional and traditional raga Puriya Dhanashri (the corresponding raga in Carnatic style being Pantuvarali). The composition set up by N Shankar for this concert was set to Aditala with 16 matras and the mukhda of the bandish was very interesting. The lyrics of both, the pallavi and bandish, were based on Devi and her Shakti. Both the artistes revelled in their respective way in exploring the raga alap and touched all the main nuances. They also ventured to do a raga Malika in this format by choosing ragas Sri Ranjani and Hindolam (in Carnatic style) and ragas Charukesi and Madhuvanti (in Hindustani style). They then traversed back to Puriaya Dhanasri and followed it with a mathematical variation of different tempos. This was very interesting and progressed towards a sawal jawab pattern between the singers with the percussionists joining in. This ended with a grand tihai.

That was followed by a short but brilliant taalvadya by both N Shankar (mrigangam) and Sandip Ghosh (tabla). Pallabi later sang a lilting thumri and then joined Shankar in paying tributes to the legendary Sri Balamuralikrishna by singing his Tillana/Tarana in the raga Kuntavarali. This was quite innovative in approach but aesthetically performed by these two artists withou deviating from the classical strictures of these two styles.

This particular concert, conceived by N Shankar, was indeed very interesting and such concerts should be presented regularly so that the lovers of these two styles can understand the intricacies of both Carnatic and Hindustani music systems.

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