Thursday in Symphony Hall, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra covered a lot of territory but never seemed to find its own place.
The star of the evening, Amjad Ali Khan, is the world’s reigning sarod performer. Almost 80 years old, he’s a legend in the Hindustani classical tradition, and it’s said that his ancestors invented the sarod, a North Indian string instrument in the lute family. To Western ears, it sounds like a darker-toned relation to the sitar, with a row of sympathetic strings that vibrate to enhance the sound for melodies and as a drone. Like the sitar, the sarod is played with the fingernails to make a twangy, elastic sound.
Khan’s Samaagam, a 45-minute concerto for sarod trio and orchestra, was a family affair: The composer was joined by his two sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, sarod virtuosos both. A fourth musician in this concertino group, percussionist Shane Shanahan, played the darbuka, a ceramic drum with a goat-skin head, as well as small- and large-frame drums.
As he slowly took the stage at the start, to a cheering but sparse crowd, Khan said the performance was “dedicated to world peace,” a sentiment inherent in his crosscultural, East-meets-West Samaagam, which in Hindi means a confluence or flowing together.
The concerto is in three movements and builds upon a dozen Indian ragas, some traditional and some composed by the senior Khan. The latter are tunes, the program notes tell us, that Khan feels have been “invoked rather than created” and that seem like “traditional ragas which were born thousands of years ago, but, for some reason, not discovered.”
Each raga has a name, a history and its own personality. Take the opening raga, for example: “Ganesh Kalyan” made its first appearance at the Ganesh Festival in Pune, India, in 1992 and was named after Ganesh, the elephant god in Indian mythology who removes obstacles and brings good luck.
Like many concertos, the orchestra is often quiet and plays a backing role, accompagnato, but, when it took the lead, it was a delight to hear the violins and cellos swerve and sway to an unfamiliar yet eternal-sounding beat. Perhaps this met one goal of the work: The creative possibilities are endless.
Improvisation is central to Indian classical music, as in most musical traditions around the world, yet European-style orchestral musicians typically have no experience creating music that isn’t printed on the page in front of them. Khan’s Samaagam quite naturally includes open spaces for the backing band to improvise. ASO bassist Michael Kurth (who is also an excellent composer) took a brief turn, blazing and assertive. Group improv is surely more complicated, so when the violins had their moment as a herd, they mostly glissando’d up and down the fingerboard. It made a dreamy, chaotic, primeval sound.
The family Khan were masters on every level — fluent, intuitive, playing in and around and off each other. With three ancient drums, percussionist Shanahan laid out a backing beat and coaxed a spectrum of percussive textures and colors. (The encore, based on the music of Bengal and Assam, featured just the soloists and was the hypnotic highlight of the evening.)
Throughout, guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, making a very challenging ASO debut, didn’t keep the orchestra ideally connected. They often seemed a beat or two ahead or behind the sarod soloists. The ASO string sections completely overpowered the woodwinds, too, such that you saw them tooting at their instruments but almost never heard their contributions. (There’s a wonderful recording of Samaagam worth listening to and dreaming about on streaming services, performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which gave the premiere in 2008.)
The next performance of Samaagam, Saturday at 8 p.m., will be part of Saturday’s Visions of India Festival at the Woodruff Arts Center, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., including music, food, dance and art.
Yankovskaya opened the concert with Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Elegía Andina,” from 2000. It’s music that the California-born composer — with a family background that’s Lithuanian-Jewish, Chinese, Peruvian and Spanish — wrote “to explore what it means to be of several ethnic persuasions, of several minds,” as she puts it. The ASO first performed this piece in 2021 and now it returns, the first step toward a foothold in the repertoire.
This 10-minute “Andean Elegy” opens in the rising mist, interrupted by taps of the woodblock, creating an exotic, mystical sound. We know the work’s title and the composer’s intentions, so we were instantly transported to an impenetrable world at high altitude. The music moves in starts and stops, gathering its energy, with confessional-sounding woodwind solos offset by deep rumbles from the ensemble.
Toward the end, we hear a flute duet that evokes Peruvian panpipes, as if reaching a destination and rounding out a narrative. Composer Frank, born in 1972, has been an established voice on the new-music scene for many years. As her musical expression gets increasingly original, or goes into unexpected places, it gets more and more compelling.
The band closed the show with familiar music: seven scenes from Sergei Prokofiev’s blue-collar Romeo and Juliet, ballet music with a gritty edge and disarming tenderness. Yankovskaya is graceful to watch on the podium, with a lot of shoulder-level arm motion, mostly with both hands in sync. Her stick technique was clear in the Prokofiev, and, although the orchestra wasn’t ideally tight and balanced, together they offered moments of sparking clarity and unbridled power.
By the end of the evening, however, it wasn’t clear why these three pieces — by Frank, Khan and Prokofiev — shared the same concert. On paper, you had music from far-flung geographies and a piece from the Russian conductor’s homeland. No doubt this was the logic. Yankovskaya and the ASO played each work with integrity but never made the musical and emotional connections needed so the whole felt greater than the sum of its considerable parts — a primary goal of smart programming.
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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.
