Sunday November 8, 01:40 AM

Source: Indian Express Finance

No show like the Chennai Season

By V Ramnarayan
Octogenarian violinist TN Krishnan is a picture of composure as he coaxes the most transcendental sounds out of his ancient violin. As the anchor says at the end of the concert, all the painstaking hard work to get the festival off to a start becomes a distant memory as the opening salvo of his Bhairavi stirs the soul as only a great raga at the hands of a great master can. But the concert is not all santa rasa, not all total surrender. It has joy and playfulness in considerable measure, too, when Krishnan, from worshipping at the altar of Tyagaraja or Dikshitar, moves on to marvel at the pranks of the little blue god as well. There is virtuosity too, a master class for aspiring musicians. You settle down to enter a state of deep emotion and contemplation. But wait! Here s an uncle in the second row, apparently lost to the soulfulness of the music just a moment ago, now engaged in loud conversation on his cellphone. You give him a dirty look and he simply closes his eyes and continues his conversation. He goes on for all of 15 minutes, unmindful of the havoc he is creating. Another cellphone rings two rows from you. Another uncle and aunt have an equally loud conversation to your right. They are actually discussing the concert, but it is no consolation to you that uncle is getting a free lesson in raga-identification when you can t hear TN Krishnan s violin, the purpose of your visit to the sabha. People constantly walk in and walk out throughout the concert. The videographer decides he must have a better view and I, seated right behind him, lose mine altogether. Children wail. Mothers run out in panic. Krishnan carries on regardless, like a phlegmatic Sunil Gavaskar or Rahul Dravid focussed on his job while wickets tumble all around him. He even beams at his accompanists and the public, as though all was well with the world and he loved the restless wanderers determined to ruin his concentration. Ah! The Season has arrived, you tell yourself. People, who never so much as peep into an auditorium during the rest of the year, now invade all the well known halls of Chennai. Banners and hoardings extol the virtues of a wide variety of sabhas and sponsors. Kitchens are closed at countless homes, as there s no time to cook and clean or even stop over between concerts. Delicious tiffin and aromatic full meals draw like a magnet not only rasikas but also bank clerks and computer specialists, salesmen and lawyers-who have no interest in music or dance to the canteens in such numbers that the uninitiated may go away, grossly overestimating the number of aficionados in the city. This is the unique atmosphere of the greatest show on earth with music and dance events all over the city from morning to night. All the great and aspiring artists of Carnatic music and classical dance appear at different venues like flashes of lightning, drenching enthusiasts in torrential outpourings of raga and swara. The worshippers at the altar of these divine arts run around in a mad frenzy of sabha-hopping for 15 days to a month on end. The December season is here, right? Wrong! It s only November. The season has expanded. This week, at Bharat Sangeet Utsav at Narada Gana Sabha, a full 38 days or so before the Mecca of Carnatic music, the Music Academy, starts its festival. By which time a number of smaller sabhas will have conducted their own festivals. Not to be left behind, The Hindu s Friday Review November Fest will have brought, not south Indian classical, but a completely different palette of songs from different parts of India, and perhaps from other parts of the world. Elsewhere, an NRI music festival will showcase talent from the Indian Diaspora. NRI listeners and viewers too will be here in strength, flocking not only to concerts but to lectures and demonstrations as well. They can easily be identified with their notebooks, solemn, academic appearance and aggressive assimilation of theories and theorems, and the distilled essence of music, dance and wisdom. Their Western counterparts from the West are unmistakable campaigners on odysseys of discovery. Their glazed looks suggest that they have achieved nirvana on shoestring budgets. Some of our leading performers have started to cut back on the number of engagements they accept during the Season, but others revel in the opportunity for multiple appearances on stage the festival presents. It s a delicate balancing act to preserve your voice, and sound fresh at every concert. They are forced by the revolution of rising expectations to unfurl something new at every show. Sometimes, their experiments succeed; at others they unleash unexpected forces of evil, waiting to pounce on their so-called musical excesses. Critics have all along quoted chapter and verse to damn the musicians, but the artists in turn, are today often as well-educated as their would be nemeses, if not actually better enlightened, and can easily blacken the face of the poor pen-pusher or mouse-mover who dared to cross swords with them on grounds technical or philosophical. It is immaterial then, if it is November or December. The Season is a temptress (sorry about my gender bias) who envelops us in her grasp much earlier now than ever before. Blame it on global warming or the insatiable urge of the players in the music and dance scene to outdo one another, but don t you try to ignore her bewitching charms. The loss will be entirely yours, if you do. For there s no show quite like the Chennai Season anywhere. The writer is editor-in-chief, Sruti,a magazine on performing arts