So I got to witness the fantastic brothers from Mysore (Nagaraj and Dr. Manjunath) perform over the past weekend. These two have become famous for their amazing talent in playing Violin. They have played with other world famous musicians. You can get to know more about them here: http://www.violinindia.com/MNM.htm. One of my friend's cousin learns music and she suggested I watch them play. I have attended the past two concerts (one theirs and the other of famous vocalist Sanjay Subramaniam) at a nearby auditorium over the past couple weekends. This weekend was mind blowing. 3 hours of technically sound, synchronous violin concert. I also got to witness them perform against each other during the performance. More interestingly, I got to meet and speak to these two great maestros personally (courtesy: my friend's cousin). She has known them for a quite sometime and thus introduced me and my friend to them. I was dumstruck to say anything to them since:
1. I have musical knowledge but not as much to be able to commend about the specificities and
2. I couldn't come up with the right words (both in English and in Kannada).
All I could muster up and say was "Adbuthavaagittu" to the older of the two Mr. Nagaraj. They were not interested in people showering accolades on them but to just have a chat about general things. Both of them are quite funny in conversation. It was great to listen to jokes in Kannada after a long time. My respect for them kept increasing as we began to spend more and more time. I felt great when Dr. Manjunath shared a compassionate moment when I said I was born in MysoreImagine these both have been performing almost non-stop for the last 15 or so days and were scheduled for almost another 20 days. The night before they were in Florida and on Saturday they were in Philly and were scheduled to perform the next three days in Chicago and so on. I was amazed at their energy level - neither looked as if they had just 3 hours of sleep the night before. I even got to have dinner with them (courtesy: my friend's cousin again). As we (me and my friend) were uninvited for dinner and had to join in at the last moment, we let all the others start their dinner and then jumped in at the last. By the time we served our plates and came out, everyone had already sat down to eat, so we three sat at a table closeby. Seeing us sit by ourselves, younger of the two brothers invited us to join them - he moved out from his circle to join us on our table along with the three of us and another person joined us. It was great seeing both of them have dinner in our traditional way - eating with hand and not spoon and fork. We meanwhile were eating the westernized way. One would imagine that being world class performers would have changed a lot about them but not really! We had a nice conversation for the next 20 mins on everything including his PhD in music. We had fun pulling my friend's cousin's leg quite a bit. In the end when we left - he was as happy as us to have been a part of this concert/dinner. Truly humble Maestros!!
Hail The Mysore Maestros ;-) !!! ("Kombu bartha ide") If you are interested in carnatic music - please listen to them playing if you get a chance.
3 comments:
Cool maga! Did you manage to click a couple of pics with them?
BTW, my knowledge on music is negligible, therefore, I'll refrain from commenting anything on the music - no piteel from me this time.
Well although my friend had a camera, i didn't feel i should.. the experience was worth a lot more than to just capture it in 3 x 4 pic. so decided against it. I sure was able to shake those magical hands though!
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