Ishan Lal

The evening of December 8 brought with it a hint of winter. The much-anticipated nip in the air lent itself perfectly to the atmosphere at St John’s Church, where, at a concert in benefit of Udayan, the audience was treated to everything from the violin concerti of Johann Sebastian Bach to the full-bodied, soaring melodies of Freddie Mercury and Billy Joel. The evening began with an invocation and a prayer dance performed by the girls of Udayan. The young voices that sang “Mangal deep jele, andhakar-e du chokh alo-e bharo prabhu” were as unfettered and confident as they were untrained. The vocals echoed among the church’s Corinthian pillars, and the little dancers holding candles endeared themselves to the audience with their earnest performance.

The Kolkata Music Academy Chamber Orchestra then performed the first movement of Bach’s Concerto for Violin in A Minor. It is a spontaneous, infectious movement that hurtles forward in perfect time, in complete contrast to the slow, pastoral movement that comes later in the same concerto. The boys in the orchestra, conducted by Abraham Mazumder, did an admirable job. Bhaskar Dutta’s violin truly sang, as it must for this concerto. It would have been interesting to hear the orchestra playing the whole concerto — especially the joyous final gigue — and the soloist performing the bariolage.

Reet Mitra played a piano solo of Burgmüller’s L’Arabesque. Speed and accuracy are most important to a piano performance of the playful, tricky L’Arabesque, where it is a real challenge to play the sixteenth notes fast with the left hand. That is what makes it a great étude. Mitra rose to the challenge splendidly; even though it seemed at times that he was on the verge of making a mistake with the unforgiving tempo of the piece, he didn’t tip over and his performance went off without a hitch. Rik’s Ganguly’s piano rendition of a fughetta and a Little Prelude by Bach was steady and confident.

Anjini Ganguly and Deepanjali Lobo followed with their piano solos of Edvard Grieg’s Mountaineer’s Song and March of the Trolls. The latter is from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, Opus 54. Perhaps the nature of this piece lends itself better to an intense orchestral performance, where the rich imagery of the prickly, ill-tempered trolls — a popular theme in Norwegian folklore — coming out of their mountain lairs after sundown to wreak havoc on unsuspecting human settlements comes alive. Whatever the reason, Lobo’s piano solo was unable to capture the tumultuous urgency in the piece or to communicate to the audience the very real sense of panic in March of the Trolls.

One of the most beautiful performances of the evening was up next. Vachagan Tadevosian played the instrumental version of Grieg’s Solveig’s Song on the oboe. Grieg had composed Solveig’s Song as part of Peer Gynt, Opus 23, which was used as the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt. In the lyrical version of the song, Solveig, who has been abandoned by Peer Gynt, sings that she will wait for him to return to her, and will be reunited with him in heaven if it comes to that. Tadevosian was able to communicate the song’s wordless emotion perfectly. The plaintive strains from his oboe were heavy with Solveig’s sadness.

Also impressive were Ishan Lal’s piano solo of the Polonaise Militaire in A Major, Opus 40, No. 1 and Kaushik Das’s piano solo of the Nocturne in E Minor, both composed by Frédéric Chopin. Lal is a dexterous pianist; the Polonaise Militaire is full of nuances that a less particular instrumentalist could easily miss, thereby robbing the piece of its precision. Lal paid attention to every detail and avoided making the mistake of laying too much stress on the heavier notes. Das recreated the haunting quality of the Nocturne in E Minor as best as he could, but his performance was less skilled than Lal’s.

Lal as a vocalist was a revelation. He sang Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and “Vienna Waits For You” with élan, while providing the piano accompaniment himself. The acoustics of the church were not really conducive to solo vocals, particularly when accompanied by an instrument, so Lal’s singing did get drowned a few times. But his voice, which strangely mirrors the languor and openness in Joel’s, made up for it. It was when he sang Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” that he slipped a fair bit. Taking on a Freddie Mercury song is ambitious at best; doing it justice is well nigh impossible. Lal made an honest attempt, but was not able to bring alive the song’s delicious jauntiness that is quintessentially Mercury.

Reverend James Stevens proved yet again that he is a distinguished Bass. Accompanied on the piano by Fauzia Marikar, he sang Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Vagabond”, and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River” in that sensational baritone that deserved a standing ovation. The Tadevosian Quartet sang sans accompaniment and wowed the audience with the sharpness of their singing and their tightness as a musical unit. Of the four pieces that they sang, two were particularly impressive. One was “Bingyol”, an Armenian folk song that a father sings to his son. The other was the upbeat “Nazan Yar”, during the performance of which Narine Tadevosian proved to be the vocal backbone of the outfit.

The concert ended with the Kolkata Music Academy Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Joseph Haydn’s Concerto for Violin in G Major. The boys picked up just the right tempo for the allegro moderato of the concerto. Throughout the adagio and the allegro, the soloist, Anirban Karak, held his own.