Hazir 2: Ustad Zakir Hussain & Hariharan Live In Concert: Events in Hyderabad

REVIEW FOR HAZIR 2: USTAD ZAKIR...

"I want to hear my inner voice", one of the performers told the sound engineers during the pre-show sound-check. Verse made way for prose as show-time approached, with requests like "Can you give me 2 more decibels?". That's pretty much the way this concert went. A coming together of Hariharan and Hussain in Hyderabad is a sure promise of Heaven, all alliteration aside. But reality was a shade short of the romance.

The sound was crisp and clear, the air conditioning cold and Hariharan was in divine form - is he ever otherwise? The man's voice is surely supernatural. Simply sublime. And when he drops the words and switches to simple sargam, Swargam appears to the music lover. It's been said a million times before and will be said a million times hence: he's perfection personified.

The first problem - for there were problems - lay in the mixing. Both inner and other voices were competing with an overly loud Tabla. And no, I'm not being sacrilegious. Zakir Hussain is Zakir Husain: no carping or complaining there. But the sound of the percussion often came perilously close to drowning The Voice. And the first time Zakir Hussain used what I can only call a disco-beat, it felt like someone had pushed a wrong button. The occasional use of this trick on subsequent occasions did nothing to make it sound any better. Ghazals are meant to tug at your heart. Foot stomping stuff has a different place, surely?

The accompaniment - Ahlad Hussain and Chandri Bhattacharya on the Harmoniums, Dilshad Khan on the Sarangi, Ashwin Sreenivasan on the Flute, and Rajendra Valluri on the Acoustic Guitar - was adequate, and special mention must be made of Valluri. The notes from his gleaming Takamine were buried deep in the poorly mixed sound for most of the 150 minutes despite the engineers trying to make amends by given him an additional mike and shifting him from port to starboard, but the brief cameo he was afforded during the Urdu Blues (sic) was excellent, notes dropping fluidly off his fingertips. Coming close on the heels of Nikhil Rao enthralling Hyderabad last November, Hyderabadi jingoists can draw some comfort.

The other problem was the empty auditorium. Why on earth should artists be kept away from the public eye particularly when a significant sponsor is the Government?

That the "VIP culture" should have no place in our lives is something much of India has still to learn. And so do the organisers. "Remove the cages", hooted fans, objecting to the ugly steel fencing that separated empty seats from still more empty seats. It's a shame that the music lover who has paid his or her good money should be demoted behind "VIPs". It's a fair bet that if the concert had been held in an open setting, with more realistic pricing, the artists too would have picked up a little more zest. Government sponsorship of the arts cannot be a good thing if it leads to elitism. And telling the fans to watch the LED displays instead of the stage was unnecessarily crass.

Hariharan closed with Tuhi Re, in response to requests from the gathering. As he asked "Tere Bina Main Kaise Jiyu?" it was hard not to compare this concert with the one your reporter saw a couple of years back at the Public Gardens. Hot, humid, interrupted by trains heading out or into Nampally and by power cuts during the concert - that held more than this coming together of maestros did.