Soul Strings, Indian and Western Music Across The Centuries, Wigmore Hall, 7 January 2023

With thanks to DALL-E for collaboration with the image

Janie and I were very excited about this concert ahead of time; we hadn’t been to an evening concert at the Wigmore Hall for yonks.

Here was an opportunity for us to see sarod masters Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash (Amjad Ali Khan‘s sons) again, this time playing with Jennifer Pike, a young violinist about whom we had heard much but not previously seen live.

The concert included an excerpt from a Bach Partita, folk music from Bengal & Assam and then a couple of Amjad Ali Khan’s ragas, both of which arranged beautifully for violin and sarod.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.

I believe an hour-long version of this concert is to be repeated later in the month in Scotland for broadcast on Radio 3 – if/when so I’ll add a link.

There was a preview of this concert and the two others that the Ali Khan Bangash family are undertaking at the Wigmore Hall on Radio 3 the day before our concert, on In Tune. Here is a link to that programme, which should work for a few weeks after the date of posting.

To give you a feel for Jennifer Pike’s wonderful interpretation of a Bach Partita, here is an excerpt from her performing a different Partita:

To give you a feel for the brothers Amaan & Ayaan Ali Bangash playing together, here is a duet recorded a few years ago. No Jennifer Pike of course and a different tabla player – we saw Anubrata Chatterjee.

The music was beautiful, but I must admit that we struggled a little to understand the ancient and modern connections as explained. For example, the notion that the sarod pieces were basically in the Lydian mode, although I think that term could only apply perhaps to the tuning of the strings, not how the music is composed or played. We could however hear wonderful relationships between the instruments and the notion (explained in the notes) that underlying melodies in the ragas are utilised in similar fashion to cantus firmus styles in late medieval, Renaissance and even Baroque music made sense.

Anyway, it was all beautiful music, deployed in virtuoso fashion, leaving us thrilled with our night out at The Wig, as is so often the case.

Sarod Legacy: The 7th Generation, Wigmore Hall, 25 July 2014

Mercifully Janie didn’t go off on one of her, “isn’t that basically an Indian theorbo thing” at the sight of a sarod…

…which is a bit odd, really, because I suspect that the sarod is a much closer relative to the theorbo than Janie’s mystery punter outburst about the “basically Chinese theorbo thing” aka the pipa:

William Carter, Theorbist Extraordinaire’s Mystery Punter Outed, 24 September 2010

So how early an instrument is the sarod?

Well, if you accept that it is basically a rubab, very old indeed. And very lute-like.

Amjad Ali Khan believes that the modern form of the instrument was developed by his family in the late 18th or 19th century, seven generations ago. Amjad Ali Khan was our man of the evening (along with his kin) so who are we to argue with that.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.

Below is a vid of a similar concert recorded a few months later, including Amjad Ali Khan with both sons who played that night in July, but I think a different tabla player. This is a truly lovely vid/recording:

We find this type of music incredibly relaxing…

…and assume it is meant to be relaxing…

…so it was not a bad thing to both nod off at times in a late night (22:00 start) gig at The Wig.

We loved this concert. revived, we also stuck around for a while to see the jazz in the bar: Dave O’Higgins Quartet – click here for listing – post bop, apparently, which was cool.

Time At The Bar, Ignite, Wigmore Hall Bar/Restaurant, 22 June 2012

This seemed like a wonderful idea – improvised music to please lovers of jazz and contemporary music, after the Evelyn Glennie concert, in the bar/restaurant.

Of course we were up for it.

Here is the Wigmore Hall puff about it – click here.

It didn’t attract much of a crowd if I remember correctly.

We enjoyed our cold compilations and some wine…

…more than we enjoyed the music, which we found surprisingly bland – not jazzy in the way we thought it might be.

We’re all for the Wigmore Hall experimenting and the late night format is one of the more interesting experiments, although they are still struggling to find a formula that works.

But we have booked two more Wigmore Lates this year (as I write in 2018), both of which look right up our street, so we really hope the idea will find its feet eventually.

Anyway, below is the running order for the concert we heard on 22 June 2012:

Carnatic Vocal & Sarod Recital, Amjad Ali Khan & Friends, Wigmore Hall, 9 March 2012

This was an opportunity to hear two genres of Indian music in one concert. I don’t think that we’d seen Amjad Ali Khan before this concert – although I had heard my father’s recordings of him playing with Ravi Shankar.

This concert was part of his residency at the Wigmore Hall, which I think was a new idea back then.

The first half of the concert was singing in the Carnatic (Southern Indian) tradition. This was interesting but not as relaxing and delightful to our ears as the sarod music performed by Amjad Ali Khan himself in the second half.

For some reason the Wigmore Hall on-line stub for this concert is incomplete and has errors in it (at the time of writing – February 20180 – here is the link anyway.

So I have uploaded the information sheet, which I am sure is accurate:

Robin Denselow in the Guardian gave the concert a top notch review – click here.

Below is a video of the Carnatic vocal music:

Below is Amjad Ali Khan performing with the same pakhawaj player we saw, Fateh Singh Gangani, albeit a few years later:

We loved the second half of the concert and resolved to see more of this stuff in the future…

…which we did – not least a “family Ali Khan” concert a couple of years later – click here or below:

Sarod Legacy: The 7th Generation, Wigmore Hall, 25 July 2014