Encouraged by the success of VivRti-2010, a two-day festival that was held April 2010, Pallavita will present VivRti-2011.
Last year, Pallavita, a Bay Area nonprofit organization, along with Latha Sriram, Pallavita’s CEO, launched this unique platform: For the first time in North America, a Karnatik festival’s focus was on children and youth performers. Senior Karnatik musicians were present during the festival, but their participation was to educate and providing depth of understanding of Karnatik music. The only performances were by children and youngsters from North America. The 2010 festival was built around lecture-demonstration series by T.M. Krishna, a highly regarded musicologist, and a popular musician especially among youth. Festival-goers were amazed with the concept, and there was an overwhelming demand for another festival.
Like last year’s festival, this presentation has been organized around events by T.M. Krishna, and the focus will be on the education of and performance by youth and children. Senior Indian musicians will be focusing on educating and taking the audience on a journey of Karnatik music.
The scope in VivRti-2011 is being expanded to include bharatanatyam performances, and a workshop series on Karnatik music took place in October. The festival will also include more Karnatik musicians from India, and Pallavita is tapping knowledgeable senior musicians of the Bay Area to conduct lecture-demonstrations.
VivRti-2011 will be held over several days to include the workshop series and the festival, which will feature lecture-demonstrations by Krishna on all three days of the festival. Sangeetha Sivakumar will be co-presenting the Saturday evening lecture-demo with Krishna, and mridangam maestros Patri Satish Kumar and Melakaveri Balaji will provide accompaniment. Senior North American students of Kumari Kanyakumari and Guruvayur Dorai will be presenting violin and mridangam ensembles as inaugural events on Saturday and Sunday mornings, respectively. This series is co-hosted by South India Fine Arts (SIFA).
Also featured will be lecture-demonstration by prominent Bay Area couple Subhapriya Srivatsan and Shri Srivatsan, Sanskrit scholar Rajalakshmi Srinivasan, and prominent Upanyasam exponent Pat Krishnan who will present on the confluence of music and spirituality.
Student ensembles from the Karnatik music schools of Latha Sriram, Asha Ramesh, Anu Suresh, and Susheelq Narasimhan will showcase the talented young vocalists and violinists of the Bay Area.
Presenting solo bharatanatyam performances will be Pallavi Sriram, student of Chitra Visweswaran; Rasika Kumar, student of Mythili Kumar; Vidya Sundaram, student of Katherine Kunhiraman; and Vinidhra Mani, student of Vidhya Subramanian. Providing accompaniment for the bharatanatyam recitals will be Sidharth Sriram (vocal), Aniruddhan Vasudevan from India (nattuvangam), Ravindrabharathy Sridharan (mridangam), and Nishant Chandran (violin). Accompaniment for various musical performances and lecture-demos will be Susheela Narasimhan, Shuba Narasimhan, and Ajay Narasimha (violin); Vignesh Venkataraman (mridangam), and Guhan Venkataraman (veena).
Pallavita is felicitating Guruvayur Dora. The felicitation speeches will be given by Narayanan Natarajan, a mridangist and accomplished musician from the Bay Area, and Arun Iyer, a former president of SIFA. Vikrum Iyer, who grew up in the Bay Area and is currently a speech writer for the Obama administration will be the keynote speaker. Vasanthi Venkataraman, SIFA president, Praveena Varadharajan, former SIFA president, and Vidhya Subramanian, an internationally acclaimed bharatanatyam dancer, will be the emcees for the festival.
Nov. 11-13. Ohlone College, 43600 Mission Blvd., Fremont.
Tickets: http://sulekha.com. vivrti@rstech.net.
VivRti@pallavita.org. http://www.Pallavita.org.