Tarun Bhattacharya
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Southbank Ctr
Apr 21, 2018
7:00 PM UTC
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About this concert
Witness a double-bill concert featuring India’s iconic sitar and santoor to celebrate the reopening of Queen Elizabeth Hall.\nHear music that stirs your inner core and slowly but surely, transports you away from the hustle and bustle of daily life, as Pandit Kushal Das returns to Darbar Festival after his last sell-out concert in 2014 with his beautiful rendering of ragas on the iconic sitar.\nPandit Tarun Bhattacharya studied under the late Pandit Ravi Shankar, and provides deeply moving music and melodic rhythm.\nTabla maestro, Pandit Yogesh Samsi, brings exhilarating improvised accompaniment for both artists.
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Tarun Bhattacharya Biography
Pandit Tarun Bhattacharya is an Indian classical musician who plays the Indian Santoor, a type of hammered dulcimer. He has studied with Ravi Shankar and played with other Indian classical musicians such as Ronu Majumdar and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. He has recorded and played both solo compositions and jugalbandis with instruments as diverse as shehnai and bansuri. Although he plays primarily in the Hindustani tradition, he has been known to perform Carnatic ragas as well.
Stylistically, Pandit Bhattacharya differs from many other santoor players in his varying uses of tones and timbres. While he has a well-developed and well-utilized hammering technique, including the sliding/glissando technique pioneered by Shivkumar Sharma, he also uses his fingernails in picking patterns by hammering with one hand and plucking with the other. An additional technique involves carefully placed palm mutes during dramatic sections such as a tihai to produce a staccato melodic conclusion. Perhaps his most unusual and stirring contribution to the santoor's legacy is a modified string at the bottom of the instrument, tuned to a very low pitch, which he presses on and bends during compositions to provide a meend-like robust underlayer or phrase ending.
Pandit Bhattacharya has also modified his santoor to include small blocks beneath each string which facilitate "fine tuning" during performances, since the santoor, with its 90-plus strings, goes out of tune frequently.
Read MoreStylistically, Pandit Bhattacharya differs from many other santoor players in his varying uses of tones and timbres. While he has a well-developed and well-utilized hammering technique, including the sliding/glissando technique pioneered by Shivkumar Sharma, he also uses his fingernails in picking patterns by hammering with one hand and plucking with the other. An additional technique involves carefully placed palm mutes during dramatic sections such as a tihai to produce a staccato melodic conclusion. Perhaps his most unusual and stirring contribution to the santoor's legacy is a modified string at the bottom of the instrument, tuned to a very low pitch, which he presses on and bends during compositions to provide a meend-like robust underlayer or phrase ending.
Pandit Bhattacharya has also modified his santoor to include small blocks beneath each string which facilitate "fine tuning" during performances, since the santoor, with its 90-plus strings, goes out of tune frequently.
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