July 2010
It was a great honour and pleasure to give the World Premiere of Ravi Shankar’s Symphony with Anoushka Shankar and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this month. As mentioned earlier in this blog, I believe the piece is an important step in the journey towards a new genre that is true to the roots of both traditions. It received a 5 minute standing ovation from the capacity audience.
This journey has already been over a decade long for me. As usual with premieres of these Indo-Western works, the professional critics were mixed, although generally very positive, whilst the audience was ecstatic. The main problem critics trained intellectually in the classical western tradition seem to have with this developing genre is what they perceive as a lack of harmonic and structural devices in the music. As mentioned below, they tend to interpret this perceived lack as a naive and simplistic use of the resources of a western orchestra, not realising that they are hearing the orchestra reveal a total respect for the many complex rules of Indian music and a quest to use each tradition in its purest form to shed light on the other.
In order to do this one has to use the resources of the orchestra with the utmost care lest the essence of the raga be obscured. This is an ongoing journey, and the more Indian and Western musicians collaborate on a meaningful level, the more they will learn from each other and the more this journey will gain momentum.
The fact that this developing genre is tremendously popular with large, extremely diverse and generally younger audiences who show their approval in no uncertain terms also seems to be a source of irritation for some critics!
Alexandra Coghlan put it well in her review for theartsdesk.com:
In Shankar’s Symphony we have a much-needed reminder of what is possible with 90 years of research, study and understanding, a fusion that is more than the sum of its musical parts.
