Anoushka Shankar‘s 2019 spring tour came to an exciting end with a show at The Town Hall in New York City on Sunday night. The acclaimed sitar player and composer has spent the past couple months performing around the country in promotion of her 2019 compilation album, Reflections, which takes listeners back through the last two decades of her accomplished career.
Her performance on Sunday may have taken place at the tail end of a dreary weekend in New York City, but the mood inside was anything but bleak, as Shankar and her backing band amazed the fans in attendance with a vibrant mix of Eastern music from her career discography.
Related: Remembering Ravi Shankar With His Landmark Monterey Pop Festival Performance
As with most Indian classical performances centered around a sitar player, the mood and energy inside the midtown Manhattan venue felt quite relaxed as a barefoot Shankar took her seat at the center of the stage with her six backing musicians seated around her. Shankar opened her performance with a slightly-lengthy rendition of “Voice of the Moon”, which began slow but eventually worked its way to a median tempo as she and her flutist Ravichandra Kulur spent some time musically dancing with one another before eventually trading solos.
What makes Anoushka unique to within the Indian classical genre is her ability to mix the styles and sounds Eastern classical with that of more familiar Western instrumentation and composition, as evidenced by the inclusion of a cellist and grand piano player in her band. Together, the two combined the vastly different musical universes with the duet performance of “Fathers” alongside her pianist, Danny Keane. They then transitioned right into “The Sun Won’t Set”, with Kulur filling in for the song’s vocal part—which was sung by Shankar’s half-sister Norah Jones on the original recording.
The latter half of Sunday’s performance featured Shankar presenting a suite of music which she composed for the 2017 reboot of the 1923 Indian silent film, Shiraz, telling the romance story behind the building of the Taj Mahal. The suite was as dynamic as it was long, but kept the listener intensely focused in on where the music may be headed next from its start to finish. The highlight(s) of the lengthy suite had to be the incredible back-and-forth play between her tabla and mridangam players Ojas Adhiya and Pirashanna Thevarajah, who each furiously hammered away on their percussion instruments in a manner (and time signatures) that would put most Western drummers to shame.
Fans can watch Shankar’s performance from Sunday in full via the pro-shot video below.
Anoushka Shankar – The Town Hall – 5/5/2019
[Video: TownHallNYC]
Shankar’s 2019 spring tour may have come to an end on Sunday, but fans in Los Angeles can still experience her music with a show at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 19th, where she’ll be celebrating the centenary of her late father and sitar legend, Ravi Shankar. Fans can head to Shankar’s website for more info.