Malladi Sreeramprasad said it was a prayer for the flood victims, seeking man-Nature harmony. The mood, therefore, was sombre, which precluded the scope for any acrobatics. The Keeravani alapana flowed slow and majestic, full of gravitas, imbuing the audience with a sense of peace.
Sreeramprasad began the raga with a long hum of the lower shadjam, and soon the brothers built up the raga essay with a series of long karvais with measured slowness, dwelling on each note — a sharp contrast to today’s T-20 Carnatic music. The result was a beautiful and tranquil Keeravani, with a Subhapanthuvarali feel— perhaps modelled on the Hindustani Keerwani, for it had echoes of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma (santoor) and Brigitte Menon (sitar). Violinist HN Bhaskar did a brilliant follow-through, playing in the same vein.
After a brief tanam, the brothers sang an ode to the flood victims — the pallavi, ‘Panchabuta shantim dehi Parameswara karunaya’, was rendered without any tala exercises, just simple and straightforward.
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However, the pre-RTP part of the concert was rather nondescript. Accompanied also by Guru Karaikudi Mani on the mridganam and N. Amrit on the ganjira, the brothers presented Thyagaraja compositions, in the ragas Suddha Dhanyasi (‘Enta Nerchina’), Varali (‘Eti Janmamu’) and Sankarabharanam (‘Eduta Nilache’).
Right through the concert, Karaikudi Mani played softly, meshing superbly with the singing and at the end of the Sankarabharanam piece the audience eagerly listened to the mridangist. The thani (along with Amrit) was brilliant, but was regrettably too short, leaving a sense of incompleteness.
In this concert, the brothers appeared to be a shade less than their regular selves. Even their swaras stuck to a pattern.
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In contrast, at their concert for Parthasarathy Swamy Sabha, they presented some scintillating rare compositions including Dikshitar’s Bhairavi piece, ‘Chintayamam’ , ‘Gouri Sukumari’ in Vasantha, created by the renowned Telugu scholar Nallan Chakravartula Krishnamacharyulu and Narayana Tirtha’s Kalyani piece ‘Kathaya Kathaya’.
These interspersed familiar Thyagaraja kritis — ‘Muddumomu’ (Suryakantam) and ‘Teliyaleru Rama’ (Dhenuka), and ‘Paramathmudu’ (Vagadheeswari) and such.
It was a more wholesome concert than the one at Narada Gana Sabha. The Vasantha was particularly brilliant, and the entire concert was peppered with imaginative niraval and swaras — an aspect that was notably lacking in the other.