A 102-strong contingent from The Navoi Opera and Ballet Grand Academic Theatre in Uzbekistan descended on
Chennai in the beginning of January 2009. The 55 ballet dancers of Navoi Bolshoi, 45 musicians of the
Philharmonic Orchestra and support staff charmed the Chennai audience with their presentations. The two
shows in Chennai on 10th and 11th January were part of a four-city tour covering New Delhi, Mumbai,
Chennai and Hyderabad.
The Navoi Opera and Ballet Grand Academic Theatre in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was started in the early 1920s
and named after Alisher Navoi, the famous Uzbek poet and statesman. It is one of the three theatres (out of more than 700)
in the erstwhile Soviet Union awarded the status of 'Bolshoi', which means 'big'. The other two theatres are Moscow,
of course, and Minsk. The Navoi Theatre is one of the leading centres for the performing arts, and can boast of shaping
and presenting many famous conductors, musicians, ballet dancers and singers who have graced the prestigious prosceniums of
La Scala, Milan, Paris Opera, Covent Garden, the metropolitan, and the Bolshoi and Mariynsky theatres.
Delhi International Arts Festival 08
A spectacular event - KAUSALYA SRINIVASAN
December 2008 drew to a close and with it the spectacular Delhi International Arts Festival
(DIAF) which brought to the forefront the sane, culturally resilient face of India.
The range was breathtaking. From Gulzar, Kunwar Narayan and Sarnath Banerjee in poetry; Shyam Benegal,
Anurag Kashyap and Sooni Taraporewala in films; to D.W. Gibson (the U.K.), Triztan Vindom (Norway),
Amir Ore (Israel) and 28 other poets from different countries as diverse as Botswana, Guyana, China and
the U.S.A. From Anup Jalota and others to great ‘desi’ dancers, musicians, folk artists, fusion bands, funky
fringe and international dancers and musicians … it was a parade of the "best of the best".
"Sir, you know Sanjay Subramanyam? He is a great singer from Madras. He travelled in this car, sir.
I picked him up from the hotel in Coimbatore for the Kalpathy kutcheri and dropped him back at the Coimbatore
airport. He gave me his mobile number, to call him, sir. You want to note it down sir? Here it is.
We all enjoyed his kutcheri, sir!," said an excited Balan, the driver of the Ambassador car of Srinivasa
Travels in Palakkad. He had come to take us to a few villages in and around Palakkad.
Thousands of tourists come to the heritage village of Kalpathy in Palakkad, Kerala, during the ten-day festival in
mid-November to witness the 'Ter' (temple car) procession and enjoy Carnatic music concerts. It has become
a national festival thanks to the initiative taken by the Tourism Department of the State Government, for
the past couple of years.
Sarada Hoffman In Rukmini Devi's footsteps- V. RAMNARAYAN
"Every Kalakshetra alumnus claims he or she was taught by Rukmini Devi. While that may be true in a broad sense,
most of us were Sarada Teacher's students." Quite a few senior dancers, from Janardhanan and Balagopalan
to Krishnaveni Lakshman and Leela Samson have said this on different occasions. "She taught generations of
students the best way of performing Bharatanatyam," Balagopalan once told this writer, "she was a perfectionist
who spared no one until we got every step, every expression, every time. Without her dedication, where would we all be?"
Recipient of the central Sangeet Natak Akademi award, and the Rukmini Devi Award for Excellence by the Centre for
Contemporary Culture, Kolkata, Sarada Hoffman was the Madras Music Academy's choice for the honour of Sangita Kala
Acharya in the just concluded season.
All Kalakshetra students between 1945 and 1996 came under the influence of Sarada Hoffman. She is the one teacher
said to have imbibed in fullest measure all that Kalakshetra founder Rukmini Devi Arundale knew in Bharatanatyam
and passed it on to her students. For over fifty years, soft-spoken but strong-willed Chinna Sarada Teacher served
her guru's cause with self-effacing dedication.
"I was a third generation theosophist. My grandfather, Mahadeva Sastri, had been the librarian at the Adyar Library during
Annie Besant’s time and my father, M. Krishnan was the first Indian headmaster of the Olcott Memorial School,
then called the Olcott Harijan School, much beloved of the children and their parents," Sarada once reminisced.
COVER STORY
The Chennai Season 2008-09 No slowdown in the festival
- MANNA SRINIVASAN
Global recession. Economic meltdown. Resource crunch. Their adverse impact on the power and pull of the
Madras Music Season to attract 'mad rasika-s' from all over, seems to have been just marginal, if at all.
There has been no curtailment in the scale and variety of the activity; if anything, the spread effect shows
increased growth and also dispersal in terms of time and space. Now, many suburbs are in the picture.
The Reckoner for the Chennai Music Season 2008-09 carries a schedule from 3rd November 2008 to 15th February 2009,
conducted by more than 100 organisations! There must be many unlisted programmes also. (Till a few years ago Sruti
used to tabulate the list according to the organisation, type of programme and related details and present an analysis,
indicating the trends.)
The valuable guide, methodically compiled by S. Kannan (cultural activist) and offered free with the compliments of the
doyen of the patrons, Nalli Kuppusami Chetti, not only indicates the daily schedule but provides information relating to
abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes, admission particulars, catering (!), individual names of the pairs/ teams, etc. It
comes with a companion volume - the Carnatic Concert Guide (Raga Ready Reckoner), compiled by B.M. Sundaram and S. Kannan.
(Really some service!)
The enduring phenomenon, acknowledged as unique in many respects even in a worldwide comparison, requires an in depth study
from the organisational and economic angles, the efforts in the arrangements, the agencies involved, the interactions and
networking, the number of participants in the performances and lecdems, and different types of programmes, the ancillary
services, the skills required, the resource mobilisation, the tourist inflow, the business and incomes generated and other
related aspects.
NEW INITIATIVE
Superb addition to Chennai's assets - V. RAMNARAYAN
Expected to be launched in March 2009, the Music Academy TAG Digital Listening Archives is a public-spirited and
well-conceived initiative towards the preservation for posterity of Carnatic concert music. It is the brainchild of
R.T. Chari, a member of the present executive committee of the Academy, and already well known for the monthly southern
heritage lectures he has been conducting for a number of years under the auspices of his family trust Ramu Endowments.
Chari had never before held any office in any of his non-business activities but Music Academy President
N. Murali persuaded him to stand for election as a member of the executive committee at the 2008 elections of the
Academy. Though Chari believes he was inducted with his music collection and his efforts to archive it in mind,
Murali denies any such premeditation on the Academy’s part. "Fortuitously, the lease for space we had rented out
expired and we repossessed it just around the same time," he said. "The archival project had been on our radar for a while,
but no headway was made because we were preoccupied with other priorities in our modernisation programme since 2005.
We needed trustworthy people with knowledge of music to handle it, and Chari was the perfect choice, as he was already
into his own personal mission of digitising his entire collection acquired over the years."
sruti.com
A 102-strong contingent from The Navoi Opera and Ballet Grand Academic Theatre in Uzbekistan descended on
Chennai in the beginning of January 2009. The 55 ballet dancers of Navoi Bolshoi, 45 musicians of the
Philharmonic Orchestra and support staff charmed the Chennai audience with their presentations. The two
shows in Chennai on 10th and 11th January were part of a four-city tour covering New Delhi, Mumbai,
Chennai and Hyderabad.
December 2008 drew to a close and with it the spectacular Delhi International Arts Festival
(DIAF) which brought to the forefront the sane, culturally resilient face of India.
"Sir, you know Sanjay Subramanyam? He is a great singer from Madras. He travelled in this car, sir.
I picked him up from the hotel in Coimbatore for the Kalpathy kutcheri and dropped him back at the Coimbatore
airport. He gave me his mobile number, to call him, sir. You want to note it down sir? Here it is.
We all enjoyed his kutcheri, sir!," said an excited Balan, the driver of the Ambassador car of Srinivasa
Travels in Palakkad. He had come to take us to a few villages in and around Palakkad.
"Every Kalakshetra alumnus claims he or she was taught by Rukmini Devi. While that may be true in a broad sense,
most of us were Sarada Teacher's students." Quite a few senior dancers, from Janardhanan and Balagopalan
to Krishnaveni Lakshman and Leela Samson have said this on different occasions. "She taught generations of
students the best way of performing Bharatanatyam," Balagopalan once told this writer, "she was a perfectionist
who spared no one until we got every step, every expression, every time. Without her dedication, where would we all be?"
All Kalakshetra students between 1945 and 1996 came under the influence of Sarada Hoffman. She is the one teacher
said to have imbibed in fullest measure all that Kalakshetra founder Rukmini Devi Arundale knew in Bharatanatyam
and passed it on to her students. For over fifty years, soft-spoken but strong-willed Chinna Sarada Teacher served
her guru's cause with self-effacing dedication.
Global recession. Economic meltdown. Resource crunch. Their adverse impact on the power and pull of the
Madras Music Season to attract 'mad rasika-s' from all over, seems to have been just marginal, if at all.
The valuable guide, methodically compiled by S. Kannan (cultural activist) and offered free with the compliments of the
doyen of the patrons, Nalli Kuppusami Chetti, not only indicates the daily schedule but provides information relating to
abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes, admission particulars, catering (!), individual names of the pairs/ teams, etc. It
comes with a companion volume - the Carnatic Concert Guide (Raga Ready Reckoner), compiled by B.M. Sundaram and S. Kannan.
(Really some service!)
Expected to be launched in March 2009, the Music Academy TAG Digital Listening Archives is a public-spirited and
well-conceived initiative towards the preservation for posterity of Carnatic concert music. It is the brainchild of
R.T. Chari, a member of the present executive committee of the Academy, and already well known for the monthly southern
heritage lectures he has been conducting for a number of years under the auspices of his family trust Ramu Endowments.
