Singing with expression
A GOOD artiste is one who with minimal phrasings etches the beauty of a raga. This is possible when he has evolved to a stage to internalise the charms of melody.
As musical awareness deepens he sees himself stripped of all irrelevances and superficialities and gains a vision of music in its true and intrinsic nature. In its absence sangita gets mired in pompous display.
If music is to serve its true purpose, the creative abilities of a musician needs activated intervention from some higher plane like the life and works of great vaggeyakaras.
These great qualities have at present come to be simulated externally more to entertain and amuse than springing from all internal inspiration.
One of the manifestations today is to give a veneer of sukham by over-emphasised vilamba kala which gives false reality to the soulful dimensions of a kriti.
Such an expressive technique distorts the true image of delicacy.
There is today more of musical scholarship than sensitivity of expression.
T. M. Krishna's performance for the Guru Smaranam (remembrance day of Palghat Mani Iyer) revealed his abiding desire to create musical images to link songs to their bhava.
It was interesting to see how he strove to transfer the sanchara combinations in the alapanas of Sriranjani and Sankarabharanam into glowing facets of the ragas through lengthened karvais and over-stretched asaivus (oscillations).
A sense of proportion in these aspects would have conferred distinction to his raga effort. So much so nothing tangible about the poetic face of those two ragas was conveyed.
The concert began briskly with the songs "Gurulekha" (Gowrimanohari) and "Sogasuga" (Sriranjani) and plummeted in tempo when he sang "Kamalamba" (Anandabhairavi) and "Dakshinamurthe" (Sankarabaranam), "Samugana Nilva" Kokilavarali was prosaic.
Violinist Sriramkumar stuck to the general pattern of an accompanist with mellowed touch to the note in the raga alapanas without trying to reflect the vilamba kala pantha of the vocalist.
So ideas and ideologies played a prominent place in his solo effort.
Guruvayoor Dorai (mridangam) was occasionally gentle. Suresh (ghatam), as in all concerts, was self-effacing.
SVK
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Entertainment
