T.M.Krishna at Hamsadwani

[bharathi]

T. M. Krishna vocal
H.N.Bhaskar violin
Manoj Shiva Mrudangam
Alandur Rajsekhar: Kanjeera
Venue: Hamsadwani, Chennai
Date: Saturday 30.3.2013

1.DiwAkarathanujam: YathukulakAmbhOji:Adi; Dikshithar; N,S
2. RAgam and ThAnam: VarAli only vocal
3.Mokshamu galadA:Saramathi; Tyagaraja;
starting with shAksAthkAra
4.rAgam:KarahrapriyA by violin
Appan avadaritha : PapanAsam Sivan
mOhini vadivikkuL (N,S)
5.bEgadA,behaag:rAgam
6. nannubrOchutaku: Todi:Adi tALam;ShyAmA ShAstri
7.vasudeva sutham:viruttam;kAnada,shamugapriya
8.KrishnA nee bEGane;vyAsarAya
9.mangalam

DiwAkarathanujam was sung beautifully in slowpaced fashion for 25 minutes. The neraval and swaras for this piece were exquisite. The rAgam and thAnam for vaRALi was short and the absence of pallavi was not as fufilling for the rasika as an RTP would have been. The karaharapriya alApana by the violinist was very good. Appan avadarita was rendered with a lot of devotion. In particular the neraval at mohini vadivikkuL; felt like Krishna was rendering a viruttam. BEGadA was etched out wonderfully, then followed beHAG and surprisingly followed by the piece in Todi. The song was sung in beautiful detail. After a lovely sketch of the viruttam in kAnadA and shanmugapriya, we heard the yamunakalyani piece.. Krishna nee BEGane.
The percussionists did not have a great role to play, they played a very subtle tani for the todi song almost ritualistically.The concert, piece wise, was very good, and to my traditional taste did not linger too long in my system.

[CRama]

Days are not far off when you will hear a tanam without confining to any particular ragam

[srikant1987]

Days are not far off when you will hear a tanam without confining to any particular ragam

Isn't that already done by other artistes? ] ]

[sridrect]

Days are not far off when you will hear a tanam without confining to any particular ragam

Frankly I just do not understand what is he trying to do ? R and T as the second item without a Pallavi; no alapana but a violin alapana !!! ???

Innovation with a purpose is always welcome. But this sort of a stuff drives me away ! I am still reeling under a SLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW rakthi kalam concert at MFAC last season and that was enough !!!!

[appu]

You know one should consider the fact that he may be BIPOLAR and does not know it.

[vasanthakokilam]

appu, that is not a nice thing to say or speculate on.

[poincare]

appu you are a genius... you could diagnose Bipolar disorder from a song list... wow... Have you even considered the remote possibility that you are just incapable of cerebrally understanding his musical idea.. and your idea of classical music begins and end with a set format...

[semmu86]

I still don't understand what's the fuss is all about. If one likes traditional stuff, there are heaps of GOLDEN stuff in Sangeethapriya & some vintage stuff happening few & far in between in Chennai (Read Ragasudha). One can just listen/ go for that and keep away from other so called concerts, rather than retorting to waste bandwidth here...... Isn't it as simple as that??

[sangeetham]

....If one likes traditional stuff, there are heaps of GOLDEN stuff in Sangeethapriya & some vintage stuff happening ....

True, Semmu...At the same time, am pretty sure there thousands of his fans (including me) who are waiting to hear the way he used to sing a normal concert....so its more out of desperate longing (and to an extent frustration), to hear him sing the way he used.....Lets face it, barring a few, I would think that most of his fans would still like him sing a normal concert than all his experimentation....If he did not click or could not draw a crowd or did not have enough gnaanam, I can understand he is forcing a way to create a mark - that is (and was) not the case....

[vasanthakokilam]

Sangeetham, I definitely see your point from that frustrated fan perspective. Understood.

>If he did not click or could not draw a crowd or did not have enough gnaanam, I can understand he is
>forcing a way to create a mark

Au Contraire! He is spending a bit of his accumulated popularity capital on this. Only those who have that in their bank account can even afford to do this. The risk is indeed quite high.

[sureshvv]

Au Contraire! He is spending a bit of his accumulated popularity capital on this. Only those who have that in their bank account can even afford to do this. The risk is indeed quite high.

Seems to be a case of Easy come, Easy go!

[kvchellappa]

I go with Sangeetham. I am one of those attracted to his music and would like him to return to the Katcheri Paddhathi of Ariyakkudi. Ariyakkudi did not introduce the format out of thin air, but getting the feel and pulse of the audience and has struck a chord with his format. The greats like GNB, MMI, SSI, MS, and countless others have latched on to it because it made aesthetic sense. Sriram Parasuram has made a critical reference to the format, how it is well-thought out and why it has caught on.
TMK is not introducing anything that is aesthetic or consistent.
Some of his views like giving the accompanists equal say or play are wholesome. If he wants to sing a varnam elaborately it can still be done in the beginning.

[Rsachi]

Generally, i think extreme 'branding' behaviour comes from a deep level of self-assurance and creative energy that can see distant real/hypnotic possibilities in experimentation in art. This is supported by so many examples from the world of creative arts including painting and music and of course dance.

I knew a brand guru Shombit Sengupta (who came and designed the rainbow colour Wipro logo when I was VP in one of the businesses there.) His business was called Shining Identity.
He started as a freelance painter from Calcutta, landed up in France, and slowly earned a name for his extreme branding ideas that made him eventually a branding consultant of big repute. He wore bizarre techni-colour clothes (somewhat like those sported by some erstwhile South Indian matinee idol thespians in the colour era- they were intended to make them look woo-able to 16-year beauties), wore a tie snipped off in the middle, and drank coffee, tea and coke mixed up in the same glass.

[Rsachi]

Salvator Dali painting reproduction: 'elephants'
website: overarts.com

[harimau]

Salvator Dali painting reproduction: 'elephants'

Those are not elephants.

Those are the desert battleships one saw in "Star Wars"!

[arasi]

Salvador Dali made time-pieces go limp. AriyakkuDi template hurried things along and gave momentum to a CM concert

[Rsachi]

[arasi]

Spoken like an original artist.
For musicians and rasikAs alike!

[shripathi_g]

Though I prefer traditional music, I find the Ariyakudi format too predictable. Part of the excitement in a concert is guessing what the artist is going to sing next. That excitement is lost when the artist starts with a varnam, sings a Ganesha krithi or something in Nattai, moves on to either a filler or a submain in a Pratimadhyama raga and so on. Rather than the format, I think the problem with TMK's experiments is a lost of completeness that we are used to. If I listen to a alapana and the rest of the song is missing, I get really desperate. There's a craving for more of the same that needs to be satisfied which is probably what's happening to rasikas in these concerts.

On the other hand, I think it might be a clever ploy by Krishna to make people buy his recordings where he seems to not experiment. . His vilamba kala renditions of Dikshithar krithis are fantastic, especially Jambupathe and Anandanatana Prakasham but sometimes, in a concert setting, the bhavam appears to be contrived. Even though the renditions are slow, he doesn't seem to be digging deep enough to bring out the beauty of the song.

[arasi]

This comment is purely about the Ari format. Unless the vidvAn/vidUshi is boring by his/her own merit , Ari-based concerts are far from blah.

Let's say, a child is building something out of lego bricks. His imagination is what is at work when he has created something out of the material. Imagine a dozen children constructing with the same old lego bricks things they visualize. Each model is bound to be different from the other, dependent on the child's imagination.
I suppose Ari's structuring a concert is perhaps taken too seriously. It's simply ideal as a guideline, I think. Ari himself wanted something different, more rasika-oriented, from the old way of hour-long treatment of each rAgA, a few of them at that, in a very long concert.
Supposing it were a silly idea, well, think of all the stalwarts from his time and of those who came after him that we have come to admire--MMI, GNB, MS, DKP, MLV--and the list goes on.

Planning their recitals based on his format did not produce the same kind of musicians either. His own student KVN, all the ones mentioned, Somu, Santhanam, Nedunuri and all others who have made a mark--they all had their own distinct stamp which makes them stand out in their originality.

And in a lighter vein, I think Ari rarely sang a ganEsA song soon after varNam in his concerts!

You have to admit. His format has a balance about it and is not uneven in flow, or is sporadic in the matter of continuity.

[shripathi_g]

Arasi, there's no doubt that his format has a good balance to it. There are current day performers like Sanjay, Abhishek to name a few who follow a similar format but still manage to keep the audience on the edge of their seats but how many others do the same. While a Sanjay can take up a Rishabhapriya or a Sucharitra for a submain, upcoming musicians feel compelled to stick to the traditional Purvikalyani or Panthuvarali submain maybe in fear of being labelled as non-purists. If one sings a Siva Siva Yenarada, there'll be probably a mama in the front seat who'll say "Appdiye Iyengarval paatu kekara madhiri iruku" whereas a Rishabhapriya might elicit murmurs of "en rishabhapriya poi paadran". Musicians do scant justice to varnams, especially some beautiful ata thala varnams. There's the usual Viriboni sung without any imagination purely for the purpose of testing the mike. One needs to take a cue from MDR in the way he sang varnams. Does Viriboni really deserve to be sung in such a hurried fashion with vocalist, violinist and mridangist simultaneously asking for the volume to be raised to insane levels? How many of our musicians really take up Vathapi Ganapathim elaborately? I like TMK's practice of taking up a weighty krithi at the beginning of the concert. He's more mentally well-prepared to do that than most other musicians. Isn't that something upcoming musicians should strive for?

[arasi]

Of course. Up coming musicians benefit exactly by doing that. Listening as much as they can to all their seniors and imbibing the best aspects (not copying) of their music. TMK has a lot to offer in the way he handles chowka kAla krutis.

The two rather different aspects of the musician-audience relationship is this:
1: The musician loves his art first, so that he sings/plays his best for himself/herself.
2: On stage, one is a performer, and the audience are kept very much in focus for that reason. On the other hand, it's not easy to please all the rasikAs in a single concert--because they come in many colors and shades.
So, one has to give oneself wholly to the performance and hope most of the rasikAs are pleased.

Again, the Ari formula works better than any, it seems.

Also, Ari's singing hamIr kalyANi and paras in those days was like singing a rishabhapriyA RTP today, is my guess!

[vasanthakokilam]

Great points 1 and 2 there, Arasi. Very well captured and succinctly so.

In this kind of performer-setting, a shared context is needed. In CM concerts, the ARI formula had become that shared context.

It is a tough thing to establish a new shared context. It takes some time and sometimes decades. Someone needs to take a risk and TMK seems to be willing to do that. That is why I do not understand why people who do not like TMK's experimentation intrinsically assume that he is doing it for 'cheap fame'. He has more to lose than gain.

[Rsachi]

You know what, I am thoroughly enjoying the best of both worlds, concerts of brilliance in a known thali format, performers of brilliance who make their own menu of the day!

[arasi]

Rsachi.
You are one happy rasikA. I like that!
There was once a rasikA who liked a musician so much--but instead of being happy listening to his favorite music, he spent much of his time being surly to even those who liked the music of the said-artiste. In his thinking, a milder degree of appreciation was as if it bordered on dislike!