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India’s symphony orchestra
On the eve of its first UK tour, leaders of Symphony Orchestra of India explain how it has defied odds
TO follow the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in Russia – as the young Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) will do in the Usher Hall’s Sunday concert series tomorrow – is a challenge that those who have created it are excited to meet.
Based at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, a multi-venue facility in the city which is unique in India and celebrating its 50th anniversary, the SOI is a stripling among symphony orchestras. It gave its inaugural concerts in 2006 and is making its first trip to the UK this month with gigs in Birmingham, Cardiff and London as well as Edinburgh. Conducting duties are split between Martyn Brabbins, music director of English National Opera and a regular visitor to Scotland who first worked with the Indian orchestra in 2016, and the SOI’s associate music director Zane Dalal. The soloist at the Usher Hall is music director Marat Bisengaliev, playing the Bruch Violin Concerto, while other venues will hear Zakir Hussain play Peshkar, his concerto for table and orchestra, an SOI commission.
The story of both the orchestra and the arts centre where it is based is one of passionate individuals who have put their time, talents and money into the arts in India, and achieved remarkable things in a short time. The NCPA was founded by Dr Jamshed Bhabha and the complex he built on a waterfront site houses both post-modern architecture and a marble staircase and chandeliers donated from the family home of a benefactor. Its programme embraces
Indian music and dance, Western orchestral and chamber music and broadcast relays of performances from the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the National Theatre in London.
His successor as chairman of the NCPA and the co-founder of the orchestra is Khushroo Suntook, an octogenarian lawyer whose CV includes founding a mineral water company, senior roles in the international Tata Group and being a top class tennis player who attracted the Davis Cup to his home city. Suntook describes Bhabha as his mentor but the orchestra is his personal dream, realised with the assistance of Bisengaliev, a violinist from Kazakhstan who now lives in France but who spent 20 years in England, and is father to actor Aruhan Galieva, who appeared in TV’s Glasgow Girls.
“It all began by chance, or karma,” Bisengaliev remembers. “I was doing a matinee concert in St James’s Church in Piccadilly with my Kazakhstan Strings and Khushroo was passing and decided to pop in and have a listen. He liked the concert and came backstage afterwards and asked me to come to India to play, which we did on a couple of occasions.
“Then he asked to help make a professional orchestra in India, which was a crazy idea.” Both men were aware that India did not have the players for an orchestra, or music conservatories training youngsters in Western musical technique. So Bisengaliev’s string players, schooled in the rigorous Russian tradition, become the core of the orchestra while their leader searched for Indians who might be able to join them.
“At first I couldn’t find any properly trained players,” says Bisengaliev. “They were practically all self-taught, although
some of them were really talented. A few were working on Bollywood films but others I found by chance. One of the second violins I found in a hotel playing in a restaurant.”
Bisengaliev auditioned more than 100 musicians and found just a handful with the potential for a crash course in orchestral playing. “Now we have 12, the oldest of them 66, and none are passengers. All are good musicians who contribute a lot. Looking back, I am astonished at their development.”
Suntook makes the comparison between the beginning of his orchestra and what was happening in the sporting world at the same time, with a Chelsea football team that contained no English players and India’s similarly diverse IPL league playing Twenty20 cricket. Disdaining the term “globalisation”, he concedes: “Everything is becoming international, the world is a small place.” The current complement of the SOI includes an English first bassoon, Constance Tanner, and tuba, Richard Evans, and is led by Albanian violinist
Adelina Hasani, who is based in Holland. The fine first oboe, Pilar Bosque, who made a crucial contribution to the orchestra’s season-opening performance of the Bruch in Mumbai, is Spanish.
Now, however, the orchestra is looking forward to its own trainees joining the ranks, having established a music school at the arts centre Bisengaliev also heads.
“The main hope for me and the orchestra is the music school that we created six years ago,” he says. “We are already producing students who are at the same level as at any music school around the world. The oldest is just 15, but those who have studied with us for six years are already technically properly trained. Now we have to hold on to them. Some of them might look to Europe and America but that is a challenge we have to face. We have to persuade them this is the place to make a career. It is the only way for survival.”
Suntook also has that goal. “Marat thinks that in another two or three years six players will be ready to join the main orchestra and that would make it very attractive, to see our youngsters playing in the national symphony orchestra.”
The other participants in the SOI are clear how important it is that Indians take pride in their new national orchestra, because that is where the financial support for it is rooted.
Zane Dalal was an organ scholar and choirmaster at Oriel College, Oxford, and studied conducting in the US before he came home to assist at the birth of the
I found some players by chance. One of the second violins I found in a hotel playing in a restaurant
SOI. Pointing out that the self-effacing Bisengaliev must have influenced upwards of 100,000 violinists worldwide, Dalal adds that the climate for an Indian orchestra was not auspicious.
“In 2009 the whole global economy went into crisis and we have continued, against all the odds and never compromising on standards. In India support of the arts is very much in a tradition of giving from a small section of society, and particularly the Parsee community here in Mumbai. Looking to the American model, it may be safer if funding remains in private hands because of that inculcated sense of giving. If we can do that here, it will be more sustainable than expecting a large handout from the government that might come with strings attached.
“But the Parsee is a community that is dying out, and wider society will have to step up. While our earliest audience was predominantly Parsee, now that’s not true at all, and when we are going on tour we are taking the aspirations of that audience with us. Western classical music has had to overcome a sense that it is British music and our endeavour recently has been to suggest to people that they need this something that they have never used before, but which has always been there. ‘Try this because it will enrich your life’, is our message. It’s a hard sell, but it’s a hard sell everywhere.”
Like Dalal, the orchestra’s general manager Xerxes Unvala has also returned home from the US. After a music degree at university in Ohio, an internship at the Kennedy Arts Centre in Washington DC led to a staff job there, and its similarity to the NCPA campus in Mumbai made his appointment a mutually agreeable decision. “In India there is only one performing arts centre, so there was no other place comparable to the Kennedy centre and I was very fortunate to find a place,” he says. “Presenting different art forms in multiple venues, it was a very similar environment. What we are trying to do with education and outreach is similar in that we have a responsibility that goes beyond presenting concerts.”
UNVALA is as passionate about the work at the music school as his colleagues, and looks to the smaller chamber orchestra of the SOI, which has a higher proportion of locally resident musicians, as the stepping stone not only for the graduating students but also to building links across the country where full-sized concert venues are few. It has been to Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderbad, while an orchestra of students performed in Abu Dhabi, the first time the young people had played outside India.
A UK tour, then, is important but one that the SOI will be seeing in the context of wider plans. And occupying the Usher Hall stage shortly after the St Petersburg Phil is only one challenge among many.
The Symphony Orchestra of India, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow at 3pm