Music sans magic
Debpriya Thakur
It was rather disappointing to attend Debpriya Thakur’s sitar recital that was not in keeping with the charm of his earlier recitals and lacked the technical proficiency required for an appealing response to the listeners. He was accompanied on
the tabla by Biswajit Pal from Kolkata.
Debpriya belongs to the Vishnupur gharana in West Bengal. He learnt to play the sitar from his father Prashant Thakur, a renowned sitarist belonging to a family of musicians including Sangeet Nayak Gopeshwar Bandopadhyay (grandfather), Sangeetacharya Surendranath Bandopadhyay and Pandit Satya Kinkar Bandopadhyay (maternal uncles), besides Pandit Prabhat Thakur the elder brother.
Debpriya is a recipient of the Scholarship for Young Artists from the Government of India’s Department of Culture for the years 2001 to 2003. He received the gold medal in the instrumental category at the national level competition organised by the All India Radio. Sur Shringar Samsad, Mumbai, conferred on him the title of Surmani in 2002.
Insight
His decision to open his recital of the evening with the raga Yaman Kalyan was indeed good. However, his handling of this charming melody was rather pedestrian. His treatment of the two Madhyam notes (the Suddha and the Teevra) could have been done with a better musical insight. The opening alap-jod-jhala sequence, taken at length, lacked the basic depth required as per the good old musical traditions.
He ought to have added some more of melodic charms and sobriety to the raga by deploying the sthayee, antara, abhog and the sanchari sequences with the necessary procedure required as per the good old Dhrupad based method, instead of doing it with permutations of the basic notes taken at random.
Lacked charm
The slow tempo 16-beat Masitkhani gat-toda sequence seemed to have been executed without the required movements for colourful variations and the development of the composition. Similar treatment was meted out to the Teen tala Razakhani composition that followed.
Gujarat’s ancient bard Narsi Bhagat’s well-known hymn “Vaishnav jan to tene re kahiye jo pir parayee jaane re”, a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi, rendered in raga Khamaj by Debpriya, had little of the melodic charms and the required devotional appeal.
The concluding piece played in a lighter vein lacked the colourful handling usually deployed to add charm to end one’s recital.
JITENDRA PRATAP
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