I wish everyone a very Happy New Year, and hope 2016 brings more music and peace to this world. The month of January also means lots of classical music festivals across India, starting with the Saptak Festival in Ahmedabad, which is held from January 1 to 13. This amazing music festival is perhaps the longest in the world where every leading artist in the country is happy to perform.
This year was the 36th edition of the festival, which started in 1980 with a concert by my guru, Pandit Ravi Shankar, who was accompanied by Pandit Kishan Maharaj on the tabla. As I was boarding my flight to go perform at this festival, a gentleman, having seen me check in my sitar, enquired if I was going to Ahmedabad to perform at the Saptak Festival. That a music festival has become synonymous with an organisation and music connoisseurs plan their annual visit as per the festival schedule is indeed a matter of pride for the Saptak family and for this, we have to congratulate the husband-wife couple, Late Pandit Nandan Mehta and Vidushi Manju Mehta. Nandanji was a disciple of Pandit Kishan Maharaj and Manjuben is one of the leading sitar players of our country and a disciple of my own guru too. It was their combined passion that drove them to start their own music school in 1978.
From a one-off concert of their respective gurus, the Saptak Festival has grown into being one of the premier festivals in India. Every evening, the concerts start around 9 pm and finish at 2.30-3am with three to four artists performing every night. In addition, on Sundays, you have a morning session for another three-four hours. Around 1,200 to 1,500 people attend the concerts every day to soak in the music. Apart from the festival in January, Saptak runs many other festivals all round the year, encouraging young talents and students of the Saptak School of Music by organising student recitals. There are over 400 students learning the sitar and tabla at the school. From being a city known as an important economic and industrial hub and of course, as the city where Mahatma Gandhi set up his Satyagraha Ashram on the banks of river Sabarmati, the Saptak School of Music has now established Ahmedabad as a cultural city too.
My first performance in this festival was in 1988 when I accompanied my guru to his concert. This was soon followed by my solo concerts from 1993 onwards. In those years, senior artists would stay on for two-three extra days after finishing their own concert, to listen to younger artists. So, at any given time, you would find artists like Pandit KishanMaharaj, Pandit Rajan-Sajan Mishra, Pandit Kumar Bose and many others, sitting in the front row and listening to youngsters.
This year was the third time when my wife, Saskia Rao-de Haas, and I performed together. Something extraordinary happened when the audience started applauding even as Saskia just finished her introductory line in Raga Nandkauns. To get applause when playing something fast or when the tabla is playing its solo bits in between is quite normal, but to get applause just after the first line has been played is indeed something unprecedented.
—sitar@shubhendrarao.com