Disha & I attended the SSF yesterday and while I don’t understand the mathematical precision of notes in Indian Classical Music fully, and that’s a shame, I still had a good time.

There were 4 performances of 1hr each -

Here’s a clip from the Bharatnatyam recital from Malvika Sarrukai. This was the first performance and it was splendid!

I’m not able to compress the video further without installing a professional editing app and it’s still at 700+ MB. I’ve added the video to my old album on Indian Dances, where I’ve got pictures from past.

I used to love clicking stage performances. It was a fun challenge to understand the music, anticipate a move, have the right camera settings and be able to press the button at the right time to get a good picture.

I always used to try capture some motion from the dance. That’s sadly not possibly with phone cameras, so I’ve kind of given up on clicking stage performances. I captured the video as an ode to the past, and of course this last part of the performance was just in perfect sync to the rhythmic music.

I didn’t record the other performances but it was followed up by instrumental and vocal performances in both Hindustani (North) and Carnatic (South) style.

On a side note, I was mentioning to Disha that there should be an app for this already to help amateurs like me to identify the notes, kind of like Shazam like ability to listen and match the sound with note patterns. One can then generate a note chart on screen. I found an app that does this as I was reading on the Carnatic Music note pattern, need to try out the app!

And lastly, SSF expands to Swara Samrat Festival, and it’s organised as a centennial anniversary of Ali Akhbar Khan, the legendary Sarod player. Seems like the festival is in 10th edition and only from this year it got organised in cities other than Kolkata. It was a lucky find on the events app then!