Débloque-notes

Un duo de sarangi, c’est assez peu commun, à ma connaissance, pour attirer l’attention dans le catalogue de Sense World Music, qui produit des CD (et des duos) à une cadence élevée. On se demande s’ils ne vont pas un peu trop vite, car en lisant les indications fournies sur leur site, extraites sans doute du livret, on se pose des questions:

The performance here, recorded during the 2005 Saptak Festival, is essentially a duet for sarangis of notable beauty, with alternating tabla accompaniment. It reaches a positively vocal degree of lyrical intensity, above all in the opening alap. Sultan Khan leads off while Ikram Khan shadows and then follows him, with a certain amount of overlap. As the notes of the raga are introduced, the music ranges widely around them, up and down in pitch, while the length of the phrases steadily extends. Just as gradually, the centre of the pitch range rises until it reaches a peak after some eight and a half minutes. For a while there is an animated focus around this peak, then an intense concentration on it which draws an audible response from the Saptak Festival audience. As track 2 begins, the tablas whose performers take it in turns to play – enter with their slow seven-beat cycle (2 + 2 + 3). The recurring melody of the gat is a haunting phrase that descends from the flattened sixth degree of the scale, usually played by the two sarangi performers in unison. After about 20 minutes the animation begins to increase, led by the sarangis and taken up with gusto by tabla.
Shortly before the end of this gat there is a quieter interlude, and then a varied melody descending the full octave links on to begin the second gat. The sarangi playing becomes more flamboyant, but towards the end it is the percussion that takes the lead in moving the pace on towards the third gat. Again linked directly, but with the tala changing to an eight-beat cycle, it features a melody that rises briefly and then falls back, and the virtuosity goes on with some frantic flights of imagination from the sarangis and a couple of steps up in pace. In the final few minutes, a gradual acceleration begins that continues right through and inspires an equally brilliant percussionist’s response.

Ce chapelet de platitudes (« a melody that rises briefly and then falls back« ) cache mal l’absence totale de mention du raga ! Pas un mot, pas même le nom. C’est un peu léger. Le nom de l’ingénieur du son n’a probablement pas été oublié, lui…

This entry was posted on Dimanche, janvier 28th, 2007 at 8:59 and is filed under divers, HINDOUSTAN, MOTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.