Photo © Markgoff2972
The risk you take when fusing two musical traditions is that the magic inherent in each gets lost in synthesis. There was much to enjoy at Wednesday night’s semi-staging of Sukanya at the Southbank Centre, but best of both worlds it was not.
Ravi Shankar’s only opera, completed posthumously by the British violinist-conductor David Murphy, is based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. It opens with a slow introduction, or alap, on the sitar, in which the main musical themes are presented. A Bharata Natyam dancer in a red sari appears on stage; each delicate movement is captured by the bells on her leather anklet, or ghungroos: so far, so Indian. A haze of sustained strings gives us our first taste of East-West fusion. But the atmosphere is muddled by the entrance of a verismo baritone, his voice amplified through the hall’s speakers. It feels like callous intrusion into the carefully spun acoustic.