Raja - Live in Concerts - Madurai Concert Telecast/Videos

[KV]

V_Sji, awesome writeup

I couldn't catch the progam on TV and haven't seen the videos yet. Some quick pointers on couple of incidents in the concert:
When the orchestra started performing Schubert's piece, one could instantly guess that it wasn't a piece by IR and that it was some European master's composition. The amount of rigorous practice and experience of the orchestra playing under IR all these years was visible as they nailed the piece brilliantly. Not sure how many orchestras (that too from the film industry) can pull off something like this. But the magical moment happened after that. IR started to sing Idhayam pogudhe as the orchestra continued playing in the background and for a second I was wondering if the symphonic piece was his own creation. The tune, a trademark IR pathos song, blended so naturally with the symphony, note by note, phrase by phrase. This was no mere 'fusion', but rather something that we've come to associate with IR - multi-threaded weaving, fusion at an atomic level. Recall Kamal's note on IR about Higgs Boson and splitting the nucleus of musical notes. Try listening to the symphony piece alone (a bloody scintillating one) and then Idhayam pogudhe separately and then listen to this piece from the concert. This is Kamal's point demonstrated live. For a layman like me, it's difficult to even associate Idhayam pogudhe with the symphony. I frankly saw no major connection. But for someone like Raaja, he probably saw the song in the symphony and just 'plucked' it out from it. And when this was demonstrated live, it was magical! : Pat thighs: :chest thumping: Raaja da!

Another interesting moment was the 2-note song. This was meant to be a gimmick, of course, a dash of pomp and glamour, a thorough vanity fair. I'm guessing that this wasn't Raaja's idea and that he was usuppEthified to do something of this sort. The 3-note song was great fun, an awesome tune emerged from it. This time around, I was pretty convinced that it would be purely gimmicky with just 2 notes. But Raaja proved me wrong. There was something more to it than just the pomp. The thought process behind the 'musical cheating', that he has spoken about before, could be seen here. He played the tune, a simple, catchy one (what else can one expect with 2 notes) and asked the chorus to sing it. He then directed the keyboardist to play two chords as the backing rhythm. The piece sounded more interesting. Asking the singers to repeat the singing, he then gave two different chords to the keyboardist and asked him to do a chord change at a certain place. And there was the effect! The same tune, but two different set of chords and the sound was different! Musical 'honesty' in gimmickry!

Raaja Subashree