Saptak's on-going live concerts once again enriched the city's music connoisseurs, starting their New Year off on a melodious note, and afforded them a chance to listen to about 25 top-grade musicians who performed at Ahmedabad during January 1 to 13. There were about 15 sessions of live concerts in which about 125 artists performed during the Saptak festival this year.
Monday's concert began with the presentation of Saptak Instrumental Ensemble in which about 10 students from Saptak School of Music played various compositions of Saptak's founder-members Manju and Nandan Mehta's daughter, Purvi Mehta, 39, sitar-artist and trainer. The performance thrilled the audience.
This was followed by rendition of raga Yaman by vocalist Monica Shah, who concluded her session with a prayer raga Desh.
Rahul Sharma, son of the renowned artist Shivkumar Sharma played a rare ancient raga Gorakh Kalyan and entertained the audience with his innate art of playing santoor. The star-attraction of the 12th session Ustad Rashid Khan began the performance with recital of raga Gaoti and followed it with rendition of few thumri and bhajaans in raga Bhairavee.
Tuesday's concert offered a live performance of Jugalbandhi between tabla played by noted artist Kumar Bose and pakhawaj played by senior artist Bhairavi Shankar. "This is an impromptu session which was spontaneously planned by consent of both the artist who had come only to attend Pt. Ajay Chakraborty's performance," says Manju Mehta, Saptak's founder member. "This change took place because Chakraborty could not come for performance due to personal reasons," Mehta informed.
This 30th Saptak festival was dedicated to the memory of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan Sahed, a wizard of sarod, and to offer a special homage the festival would end on Wednesday with the performance of Ustad Amjad Ali Khan- the highest cadre of artist playing sarod on Tuesday.
Earlier, in the morning Padmashri and Grammy award winner Pandit Vishwamohan Bhatt enthralled the audience gathered at the Bhavans College auditorium to hear the maestro perform with his rendition of Raga Nata and Bhairav, leaving the spellbound audience asking for more.
