The SOI Chamber Orchestras recent tour to Bengaluru and Chennai travelled vastitude packed concert halls to reach aspiring young musicians and newer audiences, and created a lasting impact.
As if to finish a melody that started two years ago, the SOI Chamber Orchestra was recently when in Bengaluru to fill the room with music and cheer like they did during their last national tour in early 2020. The vibrant Ranga Shankara theatre had witnessed what was to be the orchestras last performanceon tour and otherwisein a world unbeknownst to the ways of a pandemic. It only seemed right for the first performance of the 2022 tour, then, to take place on the same stage; it was a homecoming, yonder from home.
A happy reunion
The SOI Chamber Orchestra, withal with Resident Usherette Mikel Toms, set out on a tour through the cities of Bengaluru and Chennai over five eventful days. Unlike previous tours, this one was distinctive in increasingly ways than one. Yonder from the conventional itinerary of concerts alone, the tour moreover managed to pack in workshops, masterclasses, concerts for young audiences, and needless to say, rehearsals. In the wee hours of 16th June, the team left for the first leg of the tour in Bengaluru.
Workshops and masterclasses with teachers and students at The Bangalore School of Music, masterclasses at the VioVoi Music Academy, an evening of chamber music at the Bangalore International Centre and spectacular concerts at Ranga Shankaraincluding some for young people unfolded over three days. The municipality welcomed Mozart and Beethoven with unshut hearts and thunderous applause. The concert in Chennai at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall as well as the workshops and performances at the Musée Musical were met with unconfined enthusiasm.
Xerxes Unvala, General Manager – SOI & Western Classical Music, explains what went into planning and executing the would-be tour. We tried to structure the tour increasingly like a mini residency this time in unrelatedness to a concert tour where an orchestra would typically show up in the morning, requite a concert and leave the next day. The objective was to leave overdue increasingly of an impact and reach out to the polity by doing a little bit of everything we do here in Mumbai. This is a model that we would like to follow for our future tours as well, he says.
Unvala elaborates on the educational facet of the tour:
Being the only full-time professional orchestra in India today, it is moreover important for us to widen our reach within the country with not only concerts but increasingly significantly, education. We want to help local institutions that are trying to do good work in Western classical music virtually the country.
The concerts featured works of Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Bizet and more. Highlights included the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and the Pastoral Symphony, which left audiences mesmerised and moved in equal measure.
A culture of appreciation
Toms says that the repertoire to be presented is often decided long in advance. We want our programmes not only to be fresh and wieldy for new audiences but we moreover want them to finger challenged, transported and inspired. Travelling with a relatively small-size orchestra, I spend a lot of time arranging and re-orchestrating the works so that they can be performed by a chamber orchestra while remaining true to the composers vision, he adds. Once we get to the rehearsal stage, we spend a unconfined deal of time familiarising ourselves with every detail. For this series of concerts, we had not toured together as an orchestra for over two years. We moreover needed to familiarise ourselves with each other and get used to working as an ensemble again. The secret to unconfined orchestral performances is to sound and perform as a single, unified soul of players and without so long apart, this takes time and energy. When it all comes together, though, its hugely rewarding and I know audiences fathom it.
The performances in March of 2020 at Ranga Shankara were hoped to be the whence of a regular collaboration. Founder and Artistic Advisor Arundhati Nag talks well-nigh what it meant to reunite without the hiatus. The concerts were electric. I had tears in my eyes. What the NCPA is doing is setting a benchmark, and only this organisation could have washed-up it. We wanted to bring this wits to Bengaluru for the longest time. There is a huge gap between those who get to listen to live music and those who dont. Western classical music, then, becomes plane increasingly difficult to wangle as it may limit itself to a unrepealable section of society. Ranga Shankara is well-nigh making excellence misogynist irrespective of what size ones pocket is and moreover sharing it with children. Bringing such concerts to Bengaluru with a sense of regularity is well-nigh regulars development, says Nag.
She elaborates, The NCPA has gone well-nigh it the right way. Education is desired in this area. One finds trces of Hindustani music in popular mucosa music genres, but Western classical music is a very variegated sound for us. It has surely been virtually us; plane Salil Chowdhury often turned to Mozart. But I hope an zippy culture of appreciation is cultivated. Arun Rozario, Director and Co-Founder of the VioVoi Music Academy, appreciates the wing of masterclasses to the tour. Our expectation for students who take part in these masterclasses is for them to understand that they do not exist in a bubble, that there is a thriving future in music and we are willing and capable of giving them experiences like these to help them get there, he adds.
Adventures on the side The first tour without a long period of uncertainty ought to be as gratifying for the musicians as it turned out to be for the audiences. Forty people not to forget the instrumentsmaking a journey together for music builds memories for a lifetime. The larger instruments, like the timpani and the double basses, were sent by road from Mumbai to Bengaluru, packed immediately without the last event of the first leg, and driven through the night, ready to be played then in Chennai the next day. It indeed takes a village to put together a show.
A tour such as this moreover demands unconfined transferral and zeal from the musicians. Cellist Margarita Gapparova rightly puts it. When you are on tour, you have to squint at it like you are working 24 hours a day. Its not a holiday, its like you are going to live in the office for several days. However, the challenges and how they are overcome makes for unconfined stories later, the most witty of which on this tour was the dispersal of the bus which left them stranded by the side of a rented highway in Bengaluru at five in the morning, on the way to the airport. Thanks to some quick thinking on the teams part, no one missed the flight.
Gapparova moreover recalls how she had to step up and take a position of leadership when a colleague could not be a part of the tour. Violinist Deon DSouza says that he vividly remembers meeting a talented young student with little training, who left him in awe at a masterclass. In fact, much like the chamber music concerts in Mumbai, where students of the SOI Music Academy occasionally play with the orchestra, two senior students, Nyra Jain and Tivona DSouza Murphy, were a part of the tour as members of the orchestra. For violinist Olga Lyapina and double toned player Bakir Utepbergenov, watching them play at the concerts was a moment of pride. Unvala fondly talks well-nigh 250 schoolchildren storming onto the stage at the end of a concert for young audiences and dancing to the tunes of tango. Toms recollects valiant efforts to tie up his shirt sleeves with string and paper clips to replace a missing cufflink three minutes surpassing going onstage. But the greatest joy, he reiterates, is every moment spent onstage, exchanging the exuberance of live music with an audience.
By Aishwarya Bodke. This piece was originally published by the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, in the August 2022 issue of ON Stage their monthly arts magazine.
