Listen to this

Dorit and I went to the most amazing concert last night at the Boston Philharmonic Discovery Series, of which we have been subscribers for several years.

The highlight was an American premiere of a concerto for violin and tabla called Svara-Yantra by Shirish Korde. Korde is an Indian who also spent some of his childhood in Uganda and then moved to the US. This music was incredible. If you read this in time to get tickets for the Saturday or Sunday concerts in Boston, then run, do not walk, to do so. Korde created music that is a wonderful mixture of Indian music, western classical music and even jazz. The piece was commissioned by Joanna Kurkowicz, the wonderful leader of the Boston Phil, and she performed last night with Samir Chatterjee, one of the leading tabla players in the world. The tabla is (are) a pair of hand drums of contrasting shapes/sizes/timbres (more on Wikipedia). Chatterjee actually had three drums, of which he played a pair at any one time. Shirish Korde happened to be standing at the audio desk right next to our seats during the performance. When we congratulated him he was very modest and deflected the praise to the orchestra and soloists, but he was clearly emotional about the piece and the reception it received.


I was lucky to get both soloists and the composer to sign a CD I bought at the concert. Now I have to buy another copy of the CD (I am not about to risk the CD player wiping the sigs from the CD itself!).