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.