"Eat your heart out, Van Halen!" -George Harrison on U. Srinivas

[mcgillianaire]

On Friday evening I went to a South Indian/Carnatic classical music concert with my dad and some of his friends. The star attraction was U. Srinivas (see video above) who plays the mandolin. He was accompanied by his brother who also plays the mandolin and four others on traditional South Indian percussion instruments, including three of my favourites: the ghatam (an earthenware pot), the morsing (played between the teeth!) and the mridangam (the South Indian tabla). They played for over three hours and it was held at Muscat's open air amphitheatre. The event was organised by the Tamil Wing of the Indian Social Club and over a thousand people attended. There were four types of tickets, two of which cost 5 Rials ($13) & 10 Rials each, while the others were complimentary and split into VIPs & VVIPs.

We had VVIP tickets which meant we sat in the front row, but to the extreme left side. I would've preferred to sit a few rows back in a more centrally located seat. In any case, it didn't really matter as long as the performance lived up to its hype. And that it did. I'm not well versed with the intricacies of Indian classical music (North or South), but even I could appreciate the mastery of Mr Srinivas. And his accompanying troupe were not too shabby either. Each South Indian classical work usually runs 15-20 minutes and of the 8 or 9 performed, I recognised about half. A couple of them were crowd favourites and elicited finger-whistling from the rowdier sections. There were even calls for more.

All in all, a very pleasant experience. I got twitchy towards the end but I'm glad I went. South Indian classical music is even less unknown than North Indian/Hindustani classical but is just as good, if not better. I've always been fascinated by how western (classical) instruments have often been adopted by South Indian musicians into its classical fold and to great effect. The violin is by far the most popular choice but the most notable is the saxophone, exemplified by the maestro par excellence, Kadri Gopalnath. He's worth a YouTube search.

Comments

[lctrc-gtr-dde.livejournal.com]

Ooo nice! I think I mentioned him in a post some years ago, probably in a Steve Vai or a John McLaughlin context. Used to listed to a fair bit of his music a while back.

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

Oh cool! I must admit I'd never really paid attention to his stuff before but I'd heard the name. But thanks for mentioning Vai and McLaughlin. I've just unearthed some of their stuff with Srinivas, Zakir Hussain and others online! :)