Indiantonic

In January, London’s Royal Festival Hall staged the opera Sukanya to open a yearlong festival in honour of its composer, Ravi Shankar. First staged posthumously in 2017, it is his last work, described by the Evening Standard as ‘a perfect tribute to mark Shankar’s centenary year’.

An opera by Ravi Shankar, India’s sitar maestro? Improbable as it sounds, this was a logical destination for him, the culmination of a trailblazing life spent bringing East and West together under the spell of Indian music. In fact he had been writing for western orchestras, albeit sporadically, for 40 years. For 25 years before that, he had pioneered the very concept of Indian orchestral compositions – and this was the springboard for his ventures into western forms.

Shankar imagined two classical-music mountain peaks: Indian and western, while his goal was to secure for his own nation’s music the international respect and appreciation it deserved, achieving this through sensational performances at Monterey Pop