Boldly taking the sitar where no player has gone before
Anoushka Shankar and Jules Buckley Royal Albert Hall ★★★★★
This was one of the strangest Proms you could imagine, a voice from beyond the grave launching a medieval Indian instrument on a journey into space. Sitar Trek, boldly going where no player has gone before.
The late great sitar guru Ravi Shankar would have turned 100 this year. His careful, precise, teacherly voice was almost the first sound to be heard in this extraordinary sci-fi musical adventure, in a sample fired up from a laptop by British electronic producer Derwin Schlecker, known as Gold Panda.
“Ragas are precise melody forms, a raga is not a mere scale,” Shankar declared, whereupon his daughter Anoushka Shankar played a simple scale on her own enormous sitar, like a dutiful beginner. Shankar senior’s voice continued issuing instructions about “ascending and descending modes”, “uses of microtones and stresses”, while his pupil followed with examples. But when Shankar’s voice was heard saying that “the soloist does a free improvisation”, the piece achieved lift-off.
In shimmering red and white, the stylish 39-year-old Anoushka Shankar cut a figure as eye-catching as any pop diva. And with bare feet poised above an array of effects pedals that would have been the envy of a heavy metal guitar hero, she played her instrument with dazzling nimbleness and fluidity, sensitively bending notes and concocting riffs that might have left Jimmy Page weak at the knees.
All the time, she was smiling with beatific delight, as if in perfect communion with her instrument, occasionally looking up to lock eyes with Gold Panda, the bearded boffin in a beanie hat, who was nodding his head and twiddling his own impressive selection of switches and knobs. There were moments when it sounded like a folk jig on a space station, others when it almost threatened to turn into a dark drum-and-bass club banger. But there was a delicate sympathy that ensured one side of the musical experiment never overwhelmed the other, so the overall effect was a sweetly flowing, ever-shifting ambience.
Ravi Shankar brought Indian music to Western ears through his association with George Harrison and the Beatles in the pop world, and Yehudi Menuhin in the classical world. His Britishindian daughter, Anoushka, studied with her father from the age of seven. The half-sister of jazz-soul star Norah Jones, Anoushka has developed into a brilliant composer, with all the technological tools to take the instrument further than perhaps her father could ever have dreamed.
The second half saw her performing original compositions, with Jules Buckley conducting a socially distanced Britten Sinfonia. The pieces extended from sweeping cinematic epics to sensually intimate jazz moods. Austrian percussionist Manu Delago sat in as featured guest, playing the Hang drum, a modern form of handpan that looks like a flying saucer and emits ringing melodic notes that could be the music of the spheres.
Whatever these bold and inventive players had imagined for their future, it surely did not include performing in an empty venue during a pandemic. But Anoushka Shankar’s sitar explorations are nothing if not atmospheric, and seeing close-ups of musicians’ unbridled joy at playing such fantastic pieces almost compensated for not being there. To paraphrase Spock: “It’s live, Jim, but not as we know it.”
Watch for 30 days via the BBC iplayer. The Proms continue until Saturday