Over the past several years, Gauri Pathare has emerged as a singer of great promise. Endowed with a powerful and well-trained voice, she sings with confidence, verve and elan and impresses the listeners with her formidable taiyari. She learnt the intricacies of ragavidya from Jitendra Abhisheki and Padma Talwalkar. For the past one year, she had been learning from Arun Dravid, a disciple of Mogubai Kurdikar and Kishori Amonkar, those jod or compound ragas that are considered the signature ragas of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana. This was made possible by the Mani Mann fellowship instituted under Sanskriti Pratishthan by music lover Mani Mann for young musicians in the age group of 25 to 40.
At the conclusion of her fellowship, Gauri Pathare gave a scintillating vocal recital at the India International Centre auditorium in New Delhi this past Monday in front of an audience that included well-known musicians such as Shanno Khurana and Madhup Mudgal.
She began her recital with raga Jaitashri and sang the traditional bada Khayal composition in Teen taal, “Jab te piyu sapne mein aaye”. As the name suggests, Jait and Shri are the two constituent ragas of this hybrid melody. While some musicians adopt the approach of using Jait in arohi (ascending movement) and Shri in avrohi (descending movement), Jaipur-Atrauli masters blend their phrases to create a raga with its own distinctive persona. Gauri Pathare, who has also received training in voice culture from the Dhrupad maestro Sayeeduddin Dagar, displayed her virtuosity in ample measure and used her powerful voice in a most effective manner and faithfully adhered to the Jaipur-Atrauli approach of elaborating a raga through a complex treatment of laya and paying attention to every beat of the tala.
Unfolding the raga with aakaar, she released a volley of intricate taans. At times, she would create difficult spaces — rather, bottlenecks — and, while one would be waiting with bated breath to see how she would negotiate her way, she would effortlessly slip through it. Her singing was proof enough of her creative imagination. Alladiya Khan, the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli school, did not compose drut bandishes for many jod ragas. This task was handled by the disciples of his gharana. Gauri Pathare sang a drut tarana in Jaitashri composed by her current guru Arun Dravid.
The next raga chosen by her was Sawani Kalyan in which she sang the traditional bandish, “Dev dev satsang”, supposed to have been composed by Alladiya Khan himself. By this time, her voice had considerably warmed up and, consequently, her rendering became even more powerful and her voice could traverse all the space available. It was a truly inspired singing. She concluded the raga with a drut bandish, “Maanat naahi ab mori baat”, composed by Mogubai Kurdikar.
Gauri chose to sing a Kabir bhajan, “Ghat-ghat mein panchhi bolta”, and followed it up by a thumri, “Yaad piya ki aaye”, made famous by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. She displayed her vocal prowess in these renderings too.
Having said this, one can’t help but mention a few points of unease. Gauri’s Jaitshri had a preponderance of Shri and very little of Jait while her Sawani Kalyan had discernible traces of the Bihagda movement. This must have happened since she has learnt these ragas only during the past one year and, as everybody knows, a musician needs time to meditate over a raga and evolve his or her own version of it. A musician of her calibre will no doubt do so in due course.
Also, one would have felt happier had she chosen to sing the thumri after Sawani Kalyan whose drut composition was also a shringarik one, and not after the bhajan.
Vinod Lele on the tabla was as usual very good while Shyam Kumar Bharti provided her adequate accompaniment on the harmonium. Amit and Naman accompanied on the tanpura.
