If I were able to build a time machine, I would go back to the end of the 12th century and set myself up as a tour operator offering a travel package so niche it’s possible I would be the only person to have made a booking.
First, though, I need to go back to Paris in 1991, when I was listening to an album by the Indian violinist L Subramaniam in the apartment of Andrew Harvey, author of the travel book A Journey in Ladakh. I liked Indian classical music, but was only vaguely conscious of the difference between southern (Carnatic) and northern (Hindustani) music. Subramaniam was from the south and Harvey said that if I loved this kind of music, I should go to the Madras Music Festival.
I think we’re all familiar with experiences like this. An off-the-cuff suggestion lodges in one’s mind without much chance of ever being acted upon – but also without ever quite disappearing. Years passed. I became passionate about Indian classical music, I saw many of the greatest living musicians when they were playing in London (including both Subramaniam and his brother Shankar, also a violin player).
Other things happened, too. I became serious, for example, about playing and watching tennis, albeit without any sense of how far the men’s tour extended beyond the four grand slams in London, Paris, New York and Melbourne.
Eventually, in December 2006, my wife and I travelled to Madras which, by then, had changed its name to Chennai.
The city is busy, congested, polluted, but our attention was fixed on the music festival which is better known as the music season since it lasts for over a month. The programme – I have it here in front of me – runs to 200 pages and lists more than 60 concerts a day. The biggest and most prestigious venue is the Music Academy – where we saw huge stars such as the singer Bombay Jayshree – but there are performances all over the city, in all kinds of venues.
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We spent much of our time in tuk-tuks heading to places we had never heard of to listen to musicians whose names we were vaguely familiar with, but who turned out to be relatives of the people we thought we were coming to see.
The human voice and percussion enjoy approximately equal importance in north and south-Indian classical music, but the dominant solo instrument in the south is the violin – more accessible to Western ears than the “jangling instruments” (to quote Caliban in The Tempest) such as the sitar that we associate with the north. We saw so many violinists, but we also saw unexpected virtuosi such as the mandolin player U Srinivas and the saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath, both of whom have since died.
It was heaven – made more heavenly by the fact that we were staying at a very cool hotel, The Park, where, on Christmas Day, they were hosting a musical event that we had zero interest in attending: an evening of rock music.
Still, on our way out to another gig, I jokingly said to the polite young woman at the reception: “So, are you ready to rock tonight?”
“Sir,” she replied without hesitation and with none of her usual deference. “We are ready to rock every Tuesday night.” It was the most charming put-down I have ever had.
There was something else I’ll never forget about that hotel: the surprising number of very tall, incredibly fit-looking guys, loading up their plates at the buffet and waiting for huge omelettes at the egg station.
We’d come for the music festival, but it turned out we had overlapped with a tennis festival in the form of the Chennai Open. It was played on hard courts, attracted many of the world’s top players (many of whom were staying at our hotel) and, as anyone familiar with Wimbledon will appreciate, it was likely that it was possible to turn up and get tickets on the day. We didn’t have time to go, but that’s when I had the idea of a holiday package appealing to that most discerning crossover of potential customers: lovers of hard-court tennis and Carnatic music.
We always intended to go back to Chennai, but never got around to it. And then in 2018 we heard that the tennis tournament had moved to Pune. The music season, though, will surely be around forever.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/india/articles/the-golden-age-of-classical-music-in-india/
