Category: Music

Divya Ravi impressed with her stage presence and expressions. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement An unscheduled stopover at an auditorium where a Bharatanatyam performance was taking place turned out to be an enriching experience. Clueless about the performer, I watched, and was slowly drawn into the world of Andal. Dancer Divya Ravi had a stage...

2024 has been a jolly good ride for composer Justin Varghese. The two-time Kerala State film award-winning musician is having his day in Hindi cinema with his background music. First was Munjya, a hit at the box office, followed by Stree 2, the highest-grossing Hindi film ever in India. 2025 will begin with a bang...

Mandala had Chandana Bala Kalyan’s music and Amrita Lahiri’s dance in equal measure. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Song and dance were inseparable in Mandala, which depicted the journey from seeking outside to finding within. Directed and choreographed by Leela Samson, and set to poetry by Kabir, Annamacharya, Meera Bai, Kshetrayya, Soyarabai and Kanakadasa, among...

Hamzini Vytheeshwaran. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Madhuradhwani Hamzini Vytheeshwaran, a disciple of Neyveli R. Santhanagopalan, sings with a reasonable measure of depth. Her performance at the Arkay Centre Chennai for its 14th anniversary was a mixed bag, with some surprises. To her credit, she included a significant number of Tamil songs in her song list...

At the just-concluded International Film Festival of India,  Ranbir Kapoor revealed that the first song he made his daughter Raha listen to was ‘Kisi ki muskuraahaton pe ho nisar’from his grandfather Raj Kapoor’s Anari (1959). For cinephiles, this piece of trivia cascaded into a string of songs that the showman helped create on-screen to truthfully...

2024 has been a jolly good ride for composer Justin Varghese. The two-time Kerala State film award-winning musician is having his day in Hindi cinema with his background music. First was Munjya, a hit at the box office, followed by Stree 2, the highest-grossing Hindi film ever in India. 2025 will begin with a bang...

Hemanth Jois | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Hemanth Jois is an independent singer who is slowly but surely etching his fame as a promising music director in the Kannada film industry. A self-taught guitarist and composer, he has to his credit many video albums released under his own banner — The Jois Project and he...

From a previous edition of the Jazz Festival, held in Mumbai in 2023. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement Eddie Prithviraj has always disliked referring to the Madras Jazz Festival as a ‘small’ event. This is why when a panel moderator in Mumbai called it a ‘boutique festival’, he immediately chose to co-opt it. “It sounds...

As the musical legacy of Swathi Thirunal continues to be celebrated, composer-singer M Jayachandran has taken up an ambitious project — ‘Swathi’s Manipravalam’, an 18-song series on the king-composer’s padams (love poems) in Manipravalam, a literary language combining Malayalam and Sanskrit. The first song in the series, ‘Kulirmathi vadane’, sung by Carnatic musicians Ranjani and...

Rakesh Chaurasia, the nephew of Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia playing the flute on the second day of the ITC Sangeet Sammelan music festival. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Kolkata’s ITC Sangeet Research Academy celebrated Hindustani classical music from across India with stalwarts, including Shubha Mudgal and Rakesh Chaurasia, regaling captivated audiences. This five-decade-old stage has commemorated...