Tag: Soumik Datta

The Light Within: O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra Feat. Soumik Datta (Sarod) & Gurdain Rayatt (Tabla),The Wigmore Hall, 21 July 2024

Gurdain Rayatt getting ready

We don’t really patronise The Wigmore Hall for the wow factor. We quite like the fact that we are quite often amongst the youngest people in the audience. We like early music and we get a good dose of that from The Wig.

But we do sometimes book a concert at The Wigmore Hall that we think might have a wow factor and sometimes, like on this occasion, we call it right. It does tend to mean that we are bringing the average age up rather than down, though.

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

We have seen O/Modernt before, under the enthusiast auspices of Hugo Ticciati:

O/MODƏRNT: Monteverdi to Tango & Monteverdi in Historical Counterpoint, Wigmore Hall, 3 July 2015

They like a bit of fusion, do the O/Modernt gang. On this occasion, it was an East/West fusion that they explored, as well as a temporal “Bach to Beatles” shtick.

Here’s what we heard:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach –  Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue BWV1080
  • Pēteris Vasks – Concerto No. 2 ‘In Evening Light’ UK première I. Andante con passione • II. Andante cantabile • III. Andante con amore
  • Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight
  • Soumik Datta  – Migrant Birds from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Blackbird (arranged by Johannes Marmén)
  • Soumik Datta – 1947 from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • Jordan Hunt – Misremembrance
  • Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
  • Soumik Datta – Awaaz from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
  • John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Across The Universe (arranged by Johannes Marmén, plus sarod & tabla riff) – encore

To give you a feel for what we heard, here is a clip from O/Moderndt playing Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks. The piece we heard was the follow-up concerto by Vasks. It was a nice touch to have Vasks at The Wig for his premier – I even managed to congratulate him in person as we were leaving the hall.

The sarod, tabla and a heap of special furniture/equipment arrived during the interval for the second half of the show.

Soumik Datta getting ready

Technician “turning it up to eleven” for Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt

There’s no video to be found of O/Modernt and the sarod & tabla fellas all playing together, but here is a 15-year-old clip of Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt playing as a pair, which will give you a feel.

Here is a more recent recording of that pair playing together:

The most “wow” piece of the evening was Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. Here is that piece played by a more formal orchestra than O/Modernt.

The encore had to calm us down again, which it did. Here’s what Across The Universe sounds like in O/Modernt’s hands.

The sarod & tabla coda to the Across The Universe encore helped us all to float away from The Wig.

We heard several younger members of the audience saying that they had been blown away by the evening. This is surely the sort of thing The Wigmore Hall should be doing more often.

Two Fine Baroque Concerts – Versailles: The Improbable Dream & Paris-Madras, With Some Fine Grub In Between, St John Smith Square, 12 May 2018

There were two London Festival of Baroque Music concerts at St John’s Smith Square that evening and we really liked the look of both of them.

So that’s what we did – we went and looked at them both.

Versailles: The Improbable Dream

The first was Fuoco E Cenere – all music pertaining to Louis XIV and Versailles.

Here is the SJSS card for this concert.

Now that’s what I call a theorbo

Quintessentially French Baroque

This ensemble was recently involved in a French TV series about Versailles – said to be the most expensive ever made in France – here is a short musical extract from the TV programme:

Mercifully for the down to earth SJSS audience, Fuoco E Cenere did not ponce about in 17th Century wigs and outfits for our concert.

Here is a more down to earth vid and interview about Les Folies d’Espagne by Marais, which they did play on the night:

The highlight of this concert, for us, was the singing of the young guest soprano, Theodora Raftis. She has an outstanding voice and tremendous stage presence. She seemed a little overwhelmed by the occasion at first, but it was great to see her warm to her work and become the highlight of the show by the end of the concert. She was clearly well appreciated by the audience and her fellow performers. Remember the name: Theodora Raftis. Not much of her to be found on-line, but here is some Donizetti – trust us, she’s upped her game big time since this vid was recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sszddZG0cEQ

The Platters

No , we didn’t see a 1950s vocal group, but we did eat charcuterie and cheese platters with salad and a glass of wine between the concerts. I won’t dwell on the shenanigans involved in booking a table and arranging the platters – let’s just celebrate the fact that waiters David and Ramon did us proud and that we thoroughly enjoyed our twixt concert supper.

Paris-Madras

It was this second concert that really inspired me to book the evening – the notion of a fusion of French Baroque and Indian raga music. How on earth might that work? Well, it pretty much did.

Here is a link to the SJSS resource for this concert.

Artefacts from the Baroque element…

Le Concert De L’Hostel-Dieu provided the baroque element. In truth, we got more out of the ragas than we got out of the Leçons de Ténèbres. The wonderful weather of the previous week had turned to miserable cold weather that day, so neither of us was much in the mood for the lamentations of Jeremiah. More seriously, we’d seen the Leçons de Ténèbres quite recently and didn’t realise that the concert would pretty much give us the whole lot un-fused with the ragas…plus ragas unfused with the lamentations.

…artefacts from the raga element

On the ragas, in particular, we liked the bansuri flute and the sarod. Soumik Datta, the sarod virtuoso involved, is far more rock’n’roll than the rest of the performers on show that night. Here is his showreel:

Below is the explanatory vid in French about the Paris-Madras project, in which you can hear Ravi Prasad sing and Patrick Rudant play his flute, as well as the baroque players of course:

The absolute highlight of this concert for us was the few passages when the musicians segued between the two styles and the ending when they all played together. Perhaps they judged the fusion to be risky, so they minimised its use, but to our mind it was a risk that came off big time and the fusion was the reason we went to see the concert.

Anyway, we came out the other side of the evening feeling very pleased with the whole occasion.