Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Ravi Shankar: Sukanya

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

My concept of lyric theater is inclusive enough to embrace at its perimeter the genre of "world music" or maybe "classical/folk crossover," where Western art music merges with the ancient musical traditions of Asia, or to be more exact, the Indian subcontinent. My last foray into this particular subgenre was on Sunday, July 22, 2007, when I presented A. R. Rahman's Bombay Dreams (2002) in its London Records recording as produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Bombay Dreams, however, is in a pop theater music style quite removed from Ravi Shankar's Sukanya (2017), his only opera, which the master sitar player began to write at age ninety and which remained incomplete at the time of his death in 2012. His musician daughter Anoushka Shankar and David Murphy completed both the musical score and libretto. Murphy is a student of violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, who back in 1967 collaborated with Ravi in the ground-breaking West-Meets-East LP.

Sukanya is coincidentally the name of Ravi's wife, but that is also the name of a Hindu princess, who according to the old story must make the critical choice of the right husband, as watched over by two look-alike demigods. The twin spirits consult the Hindu goddess of love in their inquiry into true human love. Ravi Shankar's Sukanya was recorded live in performance in 2017. David Murphy conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra, joined by the BBC singers, a cast of six vocal soloists and an ensemble of five instrumentalists playing the classical Indian stringed and wind instruments, and tabla drums.