Sitar player Pt. Subhendra Rao at Swara Samrat Festival, 2021
Vocal, instrumental and dance performances by new and established artistes at the four-month long online Swara Samrat festival turned out to be a mixed bag
Listening to the four-month long online Swara Samrat festival (SSF) that concluded recently allowed one to note certain trends in Hindustani music that are increasingly gaining strength. The tradition of not repeating a raga previously performed at a festival is being ignored nowadays. At SSF, some ragas were repeated up to even three times.
There were 16 instrumental concerts (Hindustani), yet most of the instrumentalists chose not to highlight their instruments’ specific ‘baaj,’ preferring to follow the ‘gayaki ang’ with no ‘tantra baaj’. In format too, they played only aalap, no ‘jor’ and ‘jhala’, followed by vilambit gats rather than moving on to a fast-paced madhya laya composition. The listening experience is definitely compromised.