BENGALURU: This Republic Day, while India celebrates the forming of the Constitution back in 1950, Bengaluru welcomes an evening with music. The 32nd rendition of the Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival (LGMF) will take place on Thursday at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall. Headlined by playback and classical singer Kavita Krishnamurti and violinist and composer L Subramaniam (who also co-founded the festival in 1992 with Vijayashree Subramaniam in memory of L Subramaniam’s father V Lakshminarayana), the event will also feature musicians Fassery Diabate, Bindu Subramaniam, Ambi Subramaniam and Nazare de la Fuente.
This is the first time LGMF is coming back on stage in the city after two years of online editions. “As we couldn’t organise it due to Covid in the last couple of years, we instead organised a major tour last July when cultural activities finally returned to the stage. We did a tour in the US and Europe, where we premiered Mahatma Symphony with a full symphony orchestra in Houston on August 6. The tour was a part of LGMF. This time we decided to organise the festival in a hybrid manner with both digital and live events scheduled. But after recently doing some live shows in Kerala in December, now the festival is finally coming home,” shares Subramaniam, who mentions that as part of the digital events for LGMF, he collaborated with AR Rahman for a project tributed to the former’s father named Don’t Leave Me, released on January 18.
Krishnamurti is eagerly looking forward to the event. “We are in deep anticipation of the concert in Bengaluru as it’s our home and it is a city where there are listeners for all kinds of music. Be it Hindustani classical, Carnatic classical or Western music, the audiences are open to all kinds of genres. Even if I go on stage and sing a Bollywood song, there are admirers of that as well. And that is why a global music festival is always exciting when done here.
We have also invited musicians from the international scene and the evening promises to be a wonderful amalgamation of Indian and international music,” says Krishnamurti. So in a space where musicians from all over the world are coming to flex their musical gifts, are there any performances the two veteran musicians are particularly excited about? “Fassery Diabate, who hails from Mali in West Africa, plays the balafon and this is the first time we have invited a balafon soloist to perform. Spanish dancer and musician Nazare de la Fuente who also plays the castanets will be joining us. Other than these, a special event that evening is also going to be a percussion symphony, which will also be organised in Hyderabad on January 28 and then in Pune the day after,” says Subramaniam.
Outside of the music sessions, the event will host a dance performance by three city-based dancers choreographed on one of Subramaniam’s orchestral pieces named ‘Shantipriya’. “Shantipriya is an orchestral piece that Subramaniam had composed. Each symphony usually has three movements. The dancers have taken the third movement and have based their choreography around it. They are going to interpret it in their style, which I feel is extremely unique,” says Krishnamurti. Subramaniam’s family – Bindu and Ambi Subramaniam, will also be performing at the festival, and he is delighted to share the stage with his family. “All of them have worked on their art forms and have excelled in them. But a collaborative live performance will also open up new creative avenues to think and perform,” says Subramaniam. Krishnamurti adds that the fact that the next generation of the family is pursuing music and their performance would be the best tribute they can give to their grandfather.