Remember the "groupying" after the '94 North American Kuchipudi Tour?
And the mini-version of it in '95?
This year, it has been a minor variation of it, with Sreemati M. S.
Sheela Ramaswamy, the celebrated Carnatic Vocal singer, par excellance.
Some of you may have heard her at the 19th Tyagaraja Aradhana Festival
at Cleveland this year. What! 19th year, and I don't know of it; you
say. Yes, I said that two years ago, when somehow I got the word of the
17th, and Ravi Pattisam provided us accommodations that year and last
year. I couldn't make it this year, but next year, what with it being
the 20th year, it should be really great.
What does this have with TELUSA! I am working on an angle.
Sheela is accompanied (superbly is the word that suggests itself) by
Sreemati naLinA mOhan on the violin, Sree anUr anantakRshNa Sarma on
mRdangam, and Sreemati sukanya rAmagOpAl on ghaTam. No, that ain't a
typo.
Quick, what's the Trinity of Carnatic Music? You know it is tyAgarAja,
muttuswAmi deekshitulu, and SyAma SAstri. All telugu people, though
settled in (sangee)tamiL-nADu. sangeetamutO miLitamaina nADu? Which in
the recent years named such musicians as bAlamuraLi and mandolin
Sreenivas as their state musicians!
While muttuswAmi "vAtApi gaNapatim bhajEham" deekshitar (as he is
called) mostly wrote in Sanskrit, SyAma SAstri's compositions are both
in telugu and Sanskrit.
Most of the varNams we hear at the concerts, and the jAvaLis are written
in telugu, by musicians who for one reason or another, settled in what
is now tamiLanADu. Of course, long time ago, there wasn't that clear-cut
a line between Andhra and Tamil areas. Some of the famous telugu figures
in the independence (India, not the Andhra State issue) struggle
practised law at the High Court level, in cennapaTTaNam, which at that
time supposedly swarmed with telugu people. TanguTUri prakASam for
example. And the fictional character of Barrister Parvateesam.
Caveat. In many of the paragraphs above, and what follow below, there
might be some slight factual errors. I may be stating what is popularly
known/believed; not necessarily quoting/following some reference work.
Goes without saying that corrections are welcome.
Who are the other prolific composers in telugu? The names that
immediately come to mind are; tALLapAka annamAcArya, movvA (right, Ari?)
kshEtrayya, kancerla "evaDabba sommani kulukucu tirigEvu, rAmacandrA!"
gOpanna,....
How about mysore vAsudEvAcAr?
"ippuDu, brOcEvArevarurA, anna kRti undi. deenni elA pADAlO telusa?" I
think most of us remember that line. (and I may have connected this post
to the group, with a very liberal interpretation!)
For a long time, I thought that to be a tyAgarAja composition. Even
though the song in the movie doesn't have the tag phrase, "tyAgarAja
vinuta" or some variation of it. Only recently I came to know that it is
a composition of mysore vAsudEvAcAr. Of course, now it is so obvious,
bhAsuramuga karirAjunu brOcina
vAsudEvuDavu neeve kadA! in khamAs
I wonder how many of such great kRtis we have heard, and casually
thought them as of tyAgarAja?
M. S. Sheela (wonder if the M stands for mysore) being a kannaDiga, has
the dual attributes of sangeeta j~nAnamu, and sAhitya-Suddhi. As many
times I get annoyed at the many musicians (mostly tamil, I reckon, in my
ignorance) who distort/mis-pronounce, and at times drastically change
the intent of the song (last year, I heard "jagamElA, paramAtmA"), I
often wonder what will be the state of tyAgarAja (and other) kRtis but
for the perseverance of these musicians. I feel that I have no reason to
complain, when in our local (Washington DC and environs) Tyagaraja
Aradhana festivals (superbly conducted by Nadatarangini, a group setup
here by Sreemati Usha Char, patterned after the same organization she
had in Columbus, Ohio, when she lived there), I see a mere handful of
telugu people in the audience. Let me see, this year I saw Thota
Nageswara Rao, Durvasula Naga Sundari (perhaps the lone telugu singer on
stage), Kolachina Ramana Rao (who is always present), and Garimella B.
Sastry, who handles the audio system at many, if not all, SSVT
functions. Of course, adiyan. Oh yes, the Adipudi family from Cherry
Hill, New Jersey. More on Santosh, Pratima, and Pratibha, and Sreemati
Rajya Lakshmi sometime later.
Where did I begin, and where am I now!
Thus far we've heard MSS three times. She sings many purandara dAsa
compositions at these concerts, but makes a special attempt to sing many
of vAsudEvAcAr's also. For example,
paridAnamiccitE pAlintuvEmO! in bilahari, or
neekEla daya rAdu rAmacandra! in kadanakutUhala
In fact, in her introduction, it was mentioned that she has four
cassettes of his compositions. This is out of a twenty-cassette volume
that R. K. Padmanabhan of Sarada Kala Kendra of Bangalore has been
working on. I understand that 19 of them have been released, and the
last one is in the works.
She is on her second tour of the country. She is not that well-known in
US, but I believe that is going to change with this tour. If you happen
to know that she is singing in your city, don't pass the chance up, if
you like (love is optional) Carnatic music, and appreciate a singer who
sings clearly, has good pronunciation, a melodious voice, and superb
control over it, and sings a range of compositions. My near-total
(putting it mildly) lack of musical knowledge doesn't permit me to go
into the technical aspects of her mastery of music.
Be fore-warned that she has tremendous enthusiasm, and would sing for
four hours, or longer, if the audience has the stamina!
This has already become quite long. Let me just say that the
accompanying artists are very good, and provide her excellent support.
>From the time when I was listening to harikathas in Secunderabad, I had
a love for the violin, and Nalina Mohan does such a marvelous job of
accompanying Sheela. It is if their manO-dharmas are so intricately
inter-twined. When she is following Sheela's swara-kalpanas, she is
great. When she is following after her AlApana of the rAga, she is
superb.
Anantakrishna Sarma is no ordinary mRdangam player. I understand he
plays several instruments, and is a composer too. Son of a great father,
he must have soaked it up. It is said that the hallmark of an expert is
how "easy" he makes it appear to be. Looking at him, what he does seems
to be effortless, and delightful.
Sukanya is very skillful with her instrument, ghaTam. It seems that
another ghaTam player was initially scheduled to make this trip, but
couldn't. So Sukanya was drafted as a substitute. But she cheats; she is
no substitute. She is the real thing.
Her infectious enthusiasm in playing the ghaTam is contagious. She
matches up very well with Sarma, and shows this especially during "tani-
Avartanam". Playing ghaTam, hitting repeatedly, and quite hard, at what
essentially is a very hard surface that doesn't have much of a "give",
with your fingers, seems to be quite (physically) demanding. I think
that a mRdangam, or a tablA is easier on the digits. But difficult as it
may be, she wouldn't let up. You may go the concert just to see a lady
ghaTam player, and walk away having experienced a great concert as a
bonus.
Sheela is singing at Bridgewater Temple this Saturday, at 3pm.
C U there.
Ramakrishna