A recital sans planning
JITENDRA PRATAP
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Talent has to be combined with planning and presentation to bear fruit.
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Meetali Bannerjee Bhowmick is indeed gifted with a tuneful voice and good lungpower encompassing almost three-and-a-half octaves.
Her sense of improvisation is highly commendable. But what she urgently needs is an insight for proper planning of her performance on a public platform. Commencing her recital with a slow Ek tala composition in the hybrid raga Puriya Kalyan, and following the same with slow and fast Teen tala compositions in the same raga seemed one too many. A brief rendition of another khayal in a different raga would have been more welcome, instead of switching over to a series of light classical compositions with a thumri, a dadra, and two bhajans.
Although claiming to have received a long spell of training under the late violin maestro Pandit V.G. Jog, one however observed a good deal of her vocal meanderings with notable mannerisms of her other teachers including Meera Banerjee and Dahalia Rahut.
Varied patterns
Her at length rendering in the opening raga Puriya Kalyan was presented with much verve and with sonorous alap-badhatsu, behlawaa, sargams, and varied patterns of taan flourishes with impressive inroads into the lower and later on into the uppermost ones. One certainly relished her spontaneity in switching over to different phases of her improvisations with good aesthetic insight.
This was all the more reason for the audience to expect her to render another khayal instead of the four light-classical numbers that she rendered without the earlier verve and aesthetic approach.
The thumri in Khamaj appealed only in parts but not the dadra and the two bhajans. The concluding Meera bhajan "Mharo pranaam" an immortal piece of music associated with Shobha Gurtu, the late queen of semi-classical music, could better have been avoided since the masterpieces of legendary artistes when rendered by others as a copy fail to reach up to the level attained by the late maestros.
Meetali had excellent support on the harmonium by Ustad Mahmood Dhaulpuri and on the tabla by Samir Chatterjee.
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Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
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Thiruvananthapuram
