Initially, Lakshmi Sreeram had to deal with a bad throat, but she managed to overcome it to some extent. Perhaps, she could have chosen kritis which did not demand singing much on the higher octave that day at the Arkay Convention Centre.
It was interesting to listen to some rarely heard kritis such as ‘Sarasiruhanana’ in Mukhari, ‘Dasarathe Aparakripajaladim’ in Natakurinji and ‘Varasikhivaahana’ in Supradeepam. The alapana for Mukhari and Nattakurinji were well presented both by the vocalist and the violinist Karaikal Venkatasubramaniam.
Some of her ideas were innovative but only her voice did not cooperate too well. The same could be said about their effort in Puorvikalyani essay prefixing ‘Paralokasadaname’. No Carnatic music concert is complete without percussion accompaniment. But why is that often the mridangam artist is not shown much consideration? Lakshmi took her own time developing her main item, Keeravani before ‘Kaligiyundekada’ with niraval and swaras for ‘Baguga Sri Raghu.’ These were quite impressive but Nellai Balaji on the mridangam got just three minutes for his thani! Lakshmi could have avoided singing ‘Sri Mathrubootham’ in Kannada which was in a slow tempo, and could have dropped either ‘Varasikhivahana’ or the earlier raga elaborations of Mukhari and Nattakurinji.
