Sukanya: close but no sitar (Bachtrack)
The risk you take when fusing two musical traditions is that the magic inherent in each gets lost in synthesis. There was much to enjoy at Wednesday night’s semi-staging of Sukanya at the Southbank Centre, but best of both worlds it was not.
Ravi Shankar’s only opera, completed posthumously by the British violinist-conductor David Murphy, is based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. It opens with a slow introduction, or alap, on the sitar, in which the main musical themes are presented. A Bharata Natyam dancer in a red sari appears on stage; each delicate movement is captured by the bells on her leather anklet, or ghungroos: so far, so Indian. A haze of sustained strings gives us our first taste of East-West fusion. But the atmosphere is muddled by the entrance of a verismo baritone, his voice amplified through the hall’s speakers. It feels like callous intrusion into the carefully spun acoustic.