Sitarist Anoushka Shankar’s powerful refugee tribute
LAST time she was in Sydney sitarist-composer Anoushka Shankar was here with her father Ravi celebrating his 90th birthday and farewell world tour.
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LAST time she was in Sydney sitarist-composer Anoushka Shankar was here with her father Ravi celebrating his 90th birthday and joining his farewell world tour.
Eight years later she is back for a one-off performance at Sydney Opera House, following an appearance at WOMADelaide, performing with in quartet with three crack musicians songs from her album Land of Gold inspired by the plight of refugees flooding into Europe and other parts of the world.
The music was composed in 2015 at the height of the crisis, but also during the time she gave birth to her second son in Britain. It’s these two elements — the dark desperation of the uprooted families as portrayed on the TV news each night and a mother’s need to protect her child and wish for a better future — which informs the 10 tracks on this album which earned Shankar her sixth Grammy nomination and which features collaborations with rapper M.I.A., German-Turkish female vocalist Alev Lenz and the great English actor and activist Vanessa Redgrave.
Stripped back to the four musicians, with clever use of loops, samples and delays, the live concert production lost little from the studio original. Shankar’s co-composer, Austrian drummer and percussionist Manu Delago, progressed through a range of instruments from a standard drum kit to digital beats and — the highlight — the Hang.
MASTER
This percussion instrument, developed in Switzerland in the early 2000s, consists of two circular annealed steel hollow plates — one convex and one concave — sealed together to form a flying saucer shape, tuned to sound notes depending on where you strike it. The effect is a mellow sound somewhere between a marimba and a steel band, except it is played with the hand and fingers rather than mallets.
Delago is the undisputed master of his three-piece set of Hangs. Despite looking like accessories for a top end barbecue, in the right hands they provide a complex accompaniment of arpeggios, as in the tune Crossing the Rubicon, where Shankar’s sitar took a controlled dive through the chromatic scale in an effective duet.
If you need an instrument that can summon up the terror and horror of a child in the front line of a war this is the one
For the title track of the album, Lenz’s voice was replaced by the shehnai, an Indian oboe, played with superb artistry by Sanjeev Shankar. No relation to Anoushka, he nevertheless was a disciple of Ravi and is a regular collaborator with his daughter.
The instrument can evoke the most despairing sounds. Think of the crow whose cawing cry which reminds this listener of a vomiting baby. At other times it can be spine-tinglingly moving — cutting through the strings of the sitar and the keyboards and drums like a banshee.
If you need an instrument that can summon up the terror and horror of a child in the front line of a war this is the one.
The fourth member of the band, Londoner Tom Farmer, alternated between stand-up bass and keyboard — sampling the voices of schoolchildren for the song Reunion and M.I.T.’s rap for Jump In (Cross The Line).
With Dissolving Barriers, Anoushka’s improvised “dream” of a solution to the refugee crisis, she at last unleashed the full virtuosic command she has over the sitar in a joyful whirl of sound, her fingers flying up and down the neck, bending notes, in concert with Sanjeev’s shehnai while drums and bass laid down an unrelentingly positive dance beat.
After this brought the packed concert hall to its feet the four returned to sit at the front of the stage, away from all the electrics, to play a lovely acoustic version of Say Your Prayers, which Anoushka described as a calming lullaby written for her two young boys.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Anoushka Shankar
● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
● WHEN: Sunday, March 11