Music
Akbar Ali Khan
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Alchemy Glasgow's inaugural festival of music, dance and literature from India, Pakistan and the UK ended on Sunday with a splendid celebration of the oldest musical instrument of all, the human voice.
As elsewhere over the four days, there was long family tradition involved and the Pakistani singer Akbar Ali Khan and his three brothers, accompanying him on harmonium and hand drums, can draw on three hundred years or more of music being handed down the generations.
Khan comes across as a quiet, actually rather shy young man and his spoken communication with the audience consisted of an occasional, softly intoned "thank you". His singing, however, is fearless, covering the intervals from a low, ruminative rumble to a high-pitched, soulful cry with a voice he is able to shape apparently at will.
The songs tended to fall into a similar format, opening slowly and building into an exultant, recurring chant, although some bypassed the intro and exploded with joyous rhythm and an almost rowdy - in the best possible sense - chorus, with Khan urging the audience to clap along as he improvised at times mind-boggling, mesmerising variations.
Opening the concert, Indian singer Parveen Sabrina Khan belied her youthfulness - she's twenty-two - by giving superb accounts of Rajasthani court songs and beautifully melodic ragas with a masterly sarangi (an Indian cousin of the violin) player and tabla player she'd only met in the afternoon.
Like Akbar Ali Khan, she has the expression of an old soul in a young body and her animated singing in partnership with some lovely, deft and expressive sarangi phrasing somehow conveyed lyrical content ranging from queenly allure to rain's horticultural benefits without need of translation.
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