N.R.Harini and N.R.Sharada @BTM academy on 22.3.15

[kssr]

N.R.Harini and N.R.Sharada- Vocal duet
H.M.Smitha- Violin
B.R.Sreenivas- Mridangam
Sunaad Anoor- Khanjari

Title: Compositions of Mahila Vaggeyakars

Song List:
1. Slokam on Dakshinamurthy
2. Margazhi thingaL - Nattai - AndaaL
3. Sariya Ninage ?? - AtaNa- ??
4. Sree Kesavaaya namosthuthe - Vasantha - Vasantha madhavi
5. Pandava pakshaya parthasarathy - Kedaragowla -Yadugiriyamma ??
6. Padhumanabhaney-ninna paada.. Rangaa - Kalyani - R and S- heLavanukatte giriamma
7. Akka keLamma, Akkayya KeLamma- Akka mahadevi
8. Main: Gathi neeye endru kadharidum - Thodi- Ambujam Krishna
N and S @ KaruNa saagaram nee andro
'9. Thani
10. Bhairavi Thaaye kai kuviththey thudhi - Bhairavi malika - Smt. Suguna Purushottaman
11. Kamala Vallabha as Mangalam - Ranganayaki of Srirangam

Comments:
1. For me the best came in the end in the form of Suguna mami's composition. Extremely intelligently framed sahityam, ragams (Bhairavi, nata ~, Vasantha ~, saalaga ~, anandha ~, sindhu ~, aahir ~~) . In each ragam the end phrase is the actual prefix of the ragam dovetailing into Bhairavi of the pallavi. I have been a fan of mami's songs earlier too. She had composed and sung a song on Anjaneya and I requested her for the lyrics. When we met again in the next concert which came close behind, she gave me the song hand written by herself. I am reminded of her mischievous smile playing permanently on her lips and a casual self deprecating humour. Great soul
2. The sisters sang well.
3. Important numbers were the Kalyani and Thodi. Others were unknown songs of unknown composers (from my point of view)and hence made no impact.
4. Sharada sang Kalyani ragam very well and absolute sruti suddham.
5. Harini sang Thodi well. Her voice was a bit abrasive. I felt that it could have been mellowed down by a proper equaliser adjustment of the sound system.
6. Smitha's Kalyani was very good. She has polished her bowing technique and general playing. She has had quite a few opportunities to play for senior artists and that, I guess, has certainly helped.
7. In my humble opinion, asking artists to sing only songs of female composers, is too restrictive. Like asking to run a sack race. The duo have indeed dug up many kannada lady composers. But these compositions are more like vachanaas (similar to the tamil thevaaram, divya prabhandam, etc.,) and are, strictly speaking, not concert material. I was thinking what else they could have done. May be a meera bhajan at most. To scrape the bottom of the barrel they must at last have started Avvayar's songs - Aram seya virumbu: aaruvadhu sinam, etc., from the famous avvayaar movie by KBS.
8. Percussion was adequate.

[kssr]

Photo from my mobile

[keerthi]

Nice song list, nice review.

A few observations -


1. I am not a big fan of thematic concerts of any kind. Even if the theme is selected from topics close to my heart. I remember hearing the tODi song sung by Semmangudi on radio once, and we could barely figure out the words from amidst all the static. Smt. Vasantamadhavi, T.S.Sathyavathy's sister, has several elegant compositions on the navagrahas, aSTa-dikpAlaka-s, and the kEshavAdi forms of nArAyaNa.

They could probably have included the songs of KuTTikunju Tangacchy, the talented sister of Iraiyyaman tambi, who has kRtis as well as a kathakaLi aTTakatha. I remember a programme by T.S. Sathyavathy, and a radio series by her Sukanya Prabhakar wherein they had sung exclusively the devaranama compositions of vAggEyakAriNis.
There must be many, many contemporary composers of merit, including rasikas' own Arasi.


However this particular topic and song list gives us material to think about.

It is worth consideration, that we have hundreds upon hundreds of pada-s and jAvaLi-s [and varnam-s] delineating the various expressions of love and the pain of separation and the joy of (re)union etc; but not a single one of the prevalent stock is known to be by a woman.

In the stock of early and medieval bhakti poetry and songs, we know so few composers that were women? The very fact that we have to scrape and scrounge the historical archive to come up with token names for each language - an Andal, a Karaikkal Ammayyar, a Mahadevi Akka, a Lal Ded, the anonymous composers o the Theri gAthA [which have little by way of literary merit]

While the Sanskrit tradition has a splendid poet in Gangadevi, whose poetics skills are only matched by her exhuberant self-confidence, it is a sign of the attitude of scholars, that they questioned her authorship of the MathurA-vijaya, claiming that a woman could never write such good Sanskrit.

It has always struck me, when I used to listen to the Hindi film songs aired on AIR, that not a single one that I heard ever had either a music director or a lyricist that was a woman. I am curious to know from other rasikas if this is the case with the film industry in all the languages of India.

I have heard dozens of songs - mangalams, songs for the various stages of ArAdhana, songs for each of the SODaSa samskaras, and for rituals like marriage etc, all of anonymous provenance, that were dismissively labelled 'strIla pATalu' meaning women's songs, supposedly since they were musically and lyrically simple. Wonder who composed, taught and circulated them. Most of them can't be had for love or money now.

This concert review gave me a pretext to ramble over some of these issues. I suppose we could see the concert as an intellectual statement that reminds us of those historical erasures and the void we are inheriting.

[munirao2001]

keerthi,

With my scanty knowledge on film music, I am posting the names of the popular female music directors:
1. Jaddan Bai. 2. Saraswati Devi. 3. Usha Khanna 4. Shibani Kashyap 5. Sneha Khanwalker. 6. Bhanumati Ramakrishna 7. Swarna Lata.

munirao2001