Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Sri Mambalam Siva and Pt. Hari Prasad Chaurasia

Yesterday I had the opportunity of listening to Sri Mambalam Siva and Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia at the inaugural function of Virasat 2009, organized by SPICMACAY, Hyderabad. The open-air program was conducted in the grounds of Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet with a beautiful backdrop of artistically lit school buildings. Lot of children from various schools of the twin cities attended the program.
The program started with the Nadaswaram program of Sri Mambalam. In his brief one-hour concert, he played standard carnatic ragas like 'Bangala' and concluded the program with 'Vandemataram' and 'Raghupathi Raghava Rajaram'. The concert by Pandit Hari Prasad was very interactive. He posed lot of questions to the school children and conversed with them. He played 'Yaman' alaap and asked the students to identify the raag. He then played the popular bhajan 'Vaishnav Janato'. He promised chocolates to any student who can sing the bhajan. He concluded the program with the 'Pahadi' raag. Panditji was accompanied by Anuradha Pal on tabla.
Courtesy: Times of India
Panditji made the youngsters laugh with his witty remarks. And at the same time, he drew their attention towards the richness of Indian culture. When very few students could identify the bhajan 'Vaishnav Janato', he played 'Jingle Bells' on the flute which made everyone clap. Then he remarked that everyone knows about this rhyme but very few know our known traditional bhajans. The program concluded with a question-answer session of the students with Panditji.
I recorded some of the songs which you can find below. You can download all the songs in a single zip file.
If there are any copyright issues for putting the MP3s for free download, please let me know. I will remove the access to files in that case. I am hoping that the MP3s downloaded from here are ONLY for personal use and will NOT be used for commercial purposes.
Links: Article about the program in Times of India

1 comment:

Shankar said...

Interesting blog and even better pieces of mastery on flute by Panditji...My Guruji who accompanies him regularly mentioned about a recent Yaman that he played with Panditji hardly 2 months back in Hyderabad...Do keep the music coming if you happen to record more live events..
Cheers!
Shankar