A Masterpiece in TODI - Emi jEsitEnEmi - Tyagaraja

Introduction: This audio excerpt is from a live concert, a great vintage splendour shines the glory of our Indian classical music by musical mastery, scholarship of rendition, richness in content, complementary of talents and its phenomenal power of lifting one to another plane of consciousness. I would like to highlight some aspects of the rendition to facilitate your wholesome listening experience. I am aware that listening to music and the resulting outcome is often subjective experience and is quite difficult to verbalise and my intention is just to provide you some pointers to direct your curious attention to such interesting aspects and leave you in such an environment to experience the music according to your perception. I hope this would enhance the quality of your listening experience significantly. Discovery to Recovery This concert of 1958 has been salvaged from a big spool tape, which had been infected by fungus. A music collector, who wishes to remain unanimous had many such spools of great masters of yore, but most of it got destroyed because of flooding of rain water into the basement of his house, where he had stored those spools in card board containers. One of such spool tape, partially drenched in rain water survived fortunately. A systematic approach to recover the music was initiated through series of experiments, by varying different parameters with its setting levels. Having worked on the audio for about 6 months, I believe, the audio quality is reasonably good and one can listen to it, in its present form, to get listening pleasure and a global idea about the merit of the concert, the artistes and its time line. An Overview of the Concert As you begin to listen to the concert, you would, most probably, observe that the rendition is quite special, unique and has a style which is quite distinct from the concerts that we have listened from the sixties and latter. The method of rAgalApanas adopted here, are enriched with torrents of ‘brigAs’ which we do not seem to observe so much even in the concerts of sixties captures the listener’s attention. A practicing musician, listening to these briga laden rAgalApanas observed that the ‘brigAs’ sung by BMK, here is quite complex of array of notes emerging with patterns, akin to his manOdharma kalapana svarams and is not repetition of two or three notes with speed. The rAgAlApanas progresses smoothly and transitions gracefully and traverses through the various ‘modal shifts’ of ‘shruti-bEdham’. The ‘sangatIs’ and embellishments are so fresh and the two maestros (BMK and MSG) together create magical spell and demonstrate impeccable mastery in bringing out fresh and new dimension for the kriti presented and holds the listener in awe for their unmatched talent and their skill of bringing out those subtle nuances for a listener of deep attention. The svarams comes out so fluently like the flow of river Ganga from the mouth of Gomukh caves in Himalayas, carrying scinti