Pradeepanjalee XVII: A tribute to Ravi Shankar
View(s):Pradeep Ratnayake will return to the Sri Lankan stage with Pradeepanjalee XVII: A Tribute to Ravi Shankar on February 23 at the Lionel Wendt Theatre at 7 p.m. In it, he will play the pieces made world famous by Ravi Shankar, in honour of the master sitarist who passed away recently. Ratnayake’s latest classical music album with tablist Nitin Mitta, Santhutti, will also be released on that day.
Shankar’s immortal work, like that played in the 1967 Montery Pop Festival, his film music in Satyajit Ray’s Pathar Panchali, will find expression, among others, on Pradeep Ratnayake’s sitar, with Peshala Manoj in the role that Ustad Alla Rakha played. Pradeep will be accompanied on violin by Ananda Dabare for Raga Peelu Shankar played with Yehudi Menuhin for the Grammy Award winning East Meets West album. Sureka Amarasinghe will play the flute for the piece Morning Love that Shankar did with Jean-Pierre Rampal. It
Pradeep and Peshala performing at ‘Dhwani’, a concert staged recently at the University of Sri Jayawardenepura by the Languages and Cultural Studies Department of which Pradeep is the head.
seems fitting that the musician dubbed by a former Indian High Commissioner, Nirupam Sen, as the ‘Ravi Shankar of Sri Lanka’, thus plays tribute to his hero.
With Pradeepanjalee XVII, Sri Lankan audiences get a chance to hear a world class musician who has performed in venues like the Carnegie Hall and Asia Society in New York and the European Parliament. Pradeep Ratnayake recently toured Japan in a series of highly successful concerts and recorded his first international CD there with leading Jazz pianist, Professor Masahiko Satoh. He is due to perform his Kuveni Concerto in South Africa in March 2014 with the KZN Philharmonic Orcehstra, widely regarded as Africa’s premier orchestra, with him on the sitar and Boris Kerimov on cello, under the baton of Yasuo Shinozaki.
Niloufer Pieris’s Nelung Dance Academy co-sponsors this concert which Niloufer holds as part of the celebrations for her mother’s birth centenary and to celebrate her father’s birthday which falls on the same day, for like Niloufer, he had believed in opening every door possible for gifted artists. The other sponsors are the DFCC Bank, Prajaya Studio, which is bringing out the CD Santhutti and Torana Music Box which recently brought out the ‘Legends’ five CD pack of Pradeep Ratnayake’s music.
Tickets are priced at Rs. 3000, 2000, 1000 and Rs. 500 (balcony). The Box Plan will be available at the Lionel Wendt from
February 13.