Classical concerts to be back in city soon

Kolkata: Much to the relief of musicians and their audience, live offline classical music conferences will soon be held in the city. At least three live, on-ground conferences — the one hosted by Rajya Sangeet Academy, Behala Classical Festival and

Uttarpara Sangeet Chakra

— have been planned this winter.

The Behala Classical Festival will begin on January 9. This is the ninth year of the festival and the organizers are sticking to their four-day evening festival format.

Pt Bickram Ghosh

, one of the performers, said, “It must be lauded that they are hosting the festival this year amidst the havoc that Covid-19 has wreaked upon our lives. They will host the festival following social distancing rules. I congratulate them for standing by classical music and music in general.”

Pt Bickram Ghosh
Sandipan Banerjee, general secretary of

Behala Sanskritik Sammilani

that organizes this festival, hopes for a good audience response too. Banerjee is the secretary of Behala Notun Dal that organized a Durga Puja earlier and the experience of crowd-management will also come in handy. “We will have a sanitizing tunnel. The audience at a

classical concert

is not unruly, so we don’t apprehend too much of a problem. Every year, we have around 2,000 people in the audience. This year, we have decided to have 500 chairs at safe distances from each other on the Blind School ground. There will be ticketed online screening of the conference too,” he said.

As many as 26 artistes, including Pt Kushal Das,

Pt Kumar Bose

, Pt Anindo Chatterjee, Pt Subhankar Banerjee, Pt Abhijit Banerjee, Pt Subhen Chatterjee, Pt Samar Saha, Pt Jyoti Goho, Parthosarathy, Kaushiki Chakrabarty, Anubrata Chatterjee will be performing here. Four celebrated outstation artistes - Pt Venkatesh Kumar, Pt Kaivalya Kr Gurav, Rahul Sharma and Rakesh Chaurasia - will be flying down to Kolkata to perform for this event.

Pt Venkatesh Kumar has strictly stayed away from performing in any digital concert during the pandemic. “I have recorded in studios and the programme has been beamed. But I have not done any Facebook live shows. I believe both the audience and the artistes have traditionally enjoyed live concerts the most. I have two live concerts in Dharwad during December and January. My third live concert is in Kolkata and I am looking forward to it,” the Mysore-based vocalist said.

Last week, Pt Subhankar Banerjee performed his first live concert at the 48th Pt Motiram Pt Maniram Sangeet Samaroha in Hyderabad. “Performing offline was such a relief,” said Banerjee, who will be performing with Kaushiki Chakrabarty at the Behala Classical Festival.

Pt Subhankar Banerjee
If all goes well,

the Rajya Sangeet Academy

will be hosting its Rajya Sangeet Sammellan in February. “Every year, we have a five-day-long conference with some 25 artistes at Rabindra Sadan. For this edition too, we are trying to host it for five days,” said Munmun Hore Sinha, executive officer of West Bengal State Music Academy.

Members of the 65-year-old Uttarpara Sangeet Chakra, too, are upbeat. For the last 20 years, the organization has been hosting three-day-long classical conferences with two whole-night events. “We will be meeting in December-end to decide whether to host the programme in February or March. The venue will also be decided then,” said Anish Mukhopadhyay, joint secretary of Uttarpara Sangeet Chakra.

All possible options of hosting a simultaneous online and offline event of the Dover Lane Music Conference are being explored too. “We have 800 members and have to give passes to everyone. Besides, there are others in attendance. The government norms currently allow only 200 people to attend an indoor concert. We are hoping that number will be relaxed and we will be able to host our event at Nazrul Mancha,” said Bappa Sen, one of the organisers of the 69th Dover Lane Music Conference

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