Ilaiyaraaja/ Valiant - Symphony No 1

 

BY NARENDRA KUSNUR

Ilaiyaraaja/ Valiant: Symphony No 1

Genre: Western classical

Performed by: Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Mikel Toms 

Label: Mercuri Foundation 

Rating: *****

Let's face it. The majority of Ilaiyaraaja's fans have grown up on his south Indian film music. From Annakili to Ajantha, Geethanjali to Gunaa, the favourites have been in Tamil, Telugu and at times Malayalam and Kannada. In that field, he's been king, and his Hindi work, though lesser in quantity, has been appreciated too.

He's often shown influences of western classical music in his film scores, like Salil Choudhury had done a generation earlier in Hindi and Bengali music. But to write a full-fledged symphony requires a completely different approach, mental sinew and skill-set. Even for a listener, it needs a completely different mindset, understanding and taste, and it wouldn't be surprising if a large number of his fans have never heard an actual symphony before.

With 83-year-old Ilaiyaraaja releasing his first ever symphony, titled Valiant, a basic introduction to symphonic music is in order. The primary purpose of this column is to introduce the unfamiliar and uninitiated to this style of music, to enhance understanding and appreciation. But before we proceed, it would be worth mentioning that Valiant marks a significant moment in Indian music history as it comes from someone adored for commercial music, and that Ilaiyaraaja comes up with something absolutely breathtaking.

The symphony is essentially a long composition featuring a large orchestra, the size of which can vary, where all musicians have specific roles as written by the composer. The string section - violins, violas, cellos and upright bass - plays a dominant part. It is unlike a concerto, which also involves a large orchestra but where one or two instruments have a more prominent role. Among Indian musicians, Ravi Shankar has written two sitar concertos and Zakir Hussain has written a tabla concerto, and one for tabla, bansuri and sitar. There have been many symphonic pieces featuring Indian instruments, but among western symphonies one can think of Chennai musician Ganesh Kumar's 2018 creation Rise, in three movements across 24 minutes, making it shorter than traditional symphonies.

A standard symphony has four movements - often in a sequence of fast, slow, fast and lively and named after their tempo. The first composer associated with the form is Austrian genius Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), who wrote 106 symphonies. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote 41 symphonies. Other symphony masters included Ludwig Van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich, among many others. 

For his part, Ilaiyaraaja also uses four movements spread over 46 minutes, which is in the range many symphonies are written. But instead of naming them after tempo, he uses 'The Journey', 'Solace', 'Frontier' and 'Triumph' to describe their moods or subjects. Though they are loosely in the fast, slow, fast, lively order, there are variations in tempo within movements. The whole approach has a modern feel, but one also finds influences of earlier doyens Schubert and Jean Sibelius.

This recording features the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Mikel Toms. It was premiered live in London earlier this year, and performed in Chennai and Bengaluru earlier this month.

The opening movement lasts 17 minutes, and has a certain vibrancy that keeps building up. The other movements last 10, 8 and 11 minutes. Over the entire composition, Ilaiyaraaja uses strings, flutes, piccolos and brass judiciously and appropriately but in comparison to many western symphonies there is a larger use of percussion instruments like timpani and cymbals.

There is an obvious cinematic flavour that keeps caressing the music. If one takes certain parts, one could easily imagine the background score of a curry western or a romantic sequence, or maybe a scene from live musical theatre. The focus clearly is on melody and drama, and each movement has its own story to tell. That's what makes this symphony worth returning to again and again.

Ilaiyaraaja has earlier done fusion and crossover albums like How To Name It? and Nothing But Wind in the 1980s. This is a complete western classical composition in every sense of the word. Those new to the genre needn't bother about the technicalities, but just be aware of how a symphony is atructured. This is a work of pure genius, that keeps growing on repeated listen.