Notes of memory

The 55-piece Symphony Orchestra of India performed in the city for The Shyam Kothari Memorial Foundation

It was a concert that made one think warmly of, and want to learn more about, the man in whose memory it was held. Chennai-based Bhadrashyam Kothari, prominent industrialist and chairman and managing director of Kothari Sugars and Chemicals, passed away in 2015. To celebrate his life, family and friends gathered at The Leela Palace for a packed memorial concert by Mumbai-based Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) and traversed the musical scores of five well-known composers from the 18th Century.

Conducted by Zane Dalal, the orchestra opened with Mikhail Glinka’s ‘Overture’ to Ruslan and Lyudmila . Based on an Alexander Pushkin poem of a knight and his lady, the ‘Overture’ is a favourite curtain-raiser. The SOI charged headlong like a knight’s horse in battle, playing the soaring chord progressions and racy string sections with zest, bringing in opulent and happy notes.

With this opening act, the SOI established why it is India’s first and only professional orchestra that has performed the works of conductors as renowned as Martyn Brabbins, Carlo Rizzi, Johannes Wildner and Mischa Damev, among others. Founded in 2006 by Khushroo N Suntook, chairman of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) and Marat Bisengaliev, internationally-renowned violin virtuoso, the orchestra has performed at high-brow venues across the globe. While the core group of musicians is resident at the NCPA, the evening saw musicians of many nationalities also form part of the talented pool.

Bisengaliev, who is of Kazakh descent, spent his formative years learning the violin at a State-run conservatoire and later at Worcestershire, England, where he discovered the music of Edward Elgar, whom he counts among his favourite composers. In his black tunic with a red patch on his sleeve, Bisengaliev, the orchestra’s music director, was the soloist for the evening, playing Elgar’s ‘Salut d’amour’ (Love’s greeting). Composed as a violin and piano piece by Elgar in 1888, for himself and a student who was to later become his wife, its breezy opening melody is what lent it fame. Bisengaliev played the salon piece with the sweet intimacy it required, while the orchestra kept the underlying rhythm bobbing.

Up next was Jules Massenet’s ‘Meditation from Thais’ that premiered in Paris in 1894. A reflection of the sweeping nature of French music of that time, the nearly six-minute-long piece gives ample space for both solo violinist and orchestra to perform various shades of emotion.

Max Bruch’s ‘Finale’ from

Violin Concerto in G Minor gave Bisengaliev the chance to perform a piece that moves at the pace of dance, slows down to a brief romantic interlude and races to the end in a flurry of instrumental pyrotechnics.

The next, Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A Major , more commonly known as ‘Italian’, involved the entire orchestra that played the four parts as the composer described it to be — “joyfully”. Swinging among lively, meditative, graceful and upbeat, the first and second violins, the horns and the cellos competed to paint a picture of Italy.

The upbeat tempo continued in ‘Hungarian Dances 1 and 5’ by Johannes Brahms.

By the end of the hour-long concert, the SOI had excelled in every piece it played. But it was the two encores — a splendid rendition of the theme music from the American western, The Magnificent Seven, and the 15th Century bhajan, ‘Vaishnava Jana To’ that gave them the crown, and made the evening a fitting way to celebrate a man and his memory.