The sixth concert in the monsoon series this year was held at the Calcutta School of Music on August 21. The hall boasted a goodly attendance.

Pradyumna Singh Manot began with a Chopin repertoire, starting with the Ballade in G minor. A poised and sensitive performer, he played the monumentally difficult passages with consummate ease, although there were some frightening moments in the simpler but more exposed areas.

Pradyumna, however, got his act together very quickly and played on to a brilliant rendition of the extended finale. The posthumous Nocturne in C, and the singularly individual performance of the encore waltz, mark this young man for a promising future.

The Oxford Mission Orchestra was the next attraction. As of old, the impressive number of enthusiastic strings played a much-heard but not very well-rehearsed selection of short baroque works which (significantly in Bach’s Brandenburg No. 5) was uniformly unrecognisable till somewhere in the middle; and all played molto Oxford Mission.

The concluding item by the Calcutta Choir was a refreshing performance of ‘oldies’, which included Raindrops Keep Falling, When I am Sixty-four and Route 66, percussion by Sumit Roy and piano accompaniment by SunYoung Lee.