A Season to Remember

In the 50th year of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) featured masterworks of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The SOI Autumn 2019 Season opened with two concerti for violin, piano, and strings, performed by SOI’s Music Director Marat Bisengaliev and Italian pianist Roberto Prosseda.

The season also saw Simon O’Neill, hailed as “THE Wagnerian tenor of his generation”, return to the SOI for the third time, accompanied by fellow New Zealander, soprano Amanda Atlas, in an all-Wagner gala, featuring music from Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Die Walküre, conducted by Zane Dalal.

Russian conductor Alexander Lazarev and Irish pianist Barry Douglas gave stellar performances of Brahms and Stravinsky, and the season closed with Lazarev conducting a concert featuring the young Indian piano prodigy Lydian Nadhaswaram, alongside works by Khachaturian and Tchaikovsky.

In the opening concert of the season, seven students of the SOI Music Academy joined the SOI for the first time — a milestone achievement for the Academy. These students played Mendelssohn alongside members of the SOI, Bisengaliev and Prosseda, giving them their first experience playing in a professional orchestra, after only seven years training with the SOI Music Academy.

All Images © NCPA Mumbai

This piece was originally published by the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, in the November 2019 issue of ON Stage – their monthly arts magazine.