A sincere musical tribute was paid to Pankaj Kumar Mallick and Salil Chowdhury at Uttam Mancha (December 3) by The Calcutta Ensemble. Led by Soumyen Sarkar and laced with a commentary penned by Somen Ghosh, the concert did justice to two generations of Bengali musical genius. With solo and choral numbers backed up by accompanists, the evening unfolded like the musical melodramas of the black-and-white era. The quaint charm of Mohua Mitra’s timbre arrested the lilt of Ami ba-na bulbul (Doctor), while Rinki Gangopadhyay presented a new version of Main kya janoon (Zindagi) in the Mallick segment. The ensemble made a good effort to replicate the orchestration and sonic harmony that Chowdhury made his trademark. But it was serene and articulate Ishita Roy who stole the show with a brilliant rendition of Bichhua from Madhumati.
Anshuman Bhowmick
Mythological characters often lend themselves to fresh interpretations, as Total Theatre’s Byas (Sarala Memorial Hall, December 4) showed with its inaugural performance. The text is adapted from a screenplay originally written by Shahyad Firdaus. Dilip Kumar was supposed to star as the redoubtable sage and epic poet, but the film never saw the light of day. The stage version tries hard to make up for that loss. It discards the proscenium and uses the ambience of intimate theatre with the performance area at the same level as the audience. The play is episodic, and director Santanu Banerjee uses a mix of narrative and dialogue to tell Byas’s story from various viewpoints, giving the performance the air of an oral epic that is told and retold. The play becomes a rite of passage, taking the artist to his creative fulfilment.
Satadru Ojha
Drik India’s exhibition of Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer’s snaps at Birla Academy had among them some distorted potraits. The effects of destortion and some loud colours made the pictures aesthetically unappealing. Meyer has gone in for manipulations to establish cultural links among Brazil, Mexico and Bangladesh. Can a few large-sized distorted potraits represent the culture of such vibrant and colourful countries? The effects of most of Meyer’s digital photographs could have been achieved by a sensible application of wide-angle lenses with various depths of fields.
Sunil K. Dutt
