One of Britain’s leading Hindustani and Carnatic music festivals will honour the memory of legendary sitar maestro Ravi Shankar in 2013.
The Darbar Festival at the Southbank Centre, on the banks of the Thames in London, kicks off here today for a weekend of Indian classical music. This year also marks a special focus on female musicians from the country, some of whom will be performing in London for the first time.
“Here in the UK we can programme the festival free from the discrimination that most musicians face because of politics, caste, sex and religion back in India. We continue to expose brilliant new musicians to UK audiences,” said Sandeep Virdee, artistic director of the Darbar Festival. Some of the highlights from 2013 festival include one of India’s greatest tabla maestros Yogesh Samsi, sitar artist Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee, and eminent singer in the South Indian devotional Carnatic tradition Sudha Ragunathan. “This year the festival focuses on Indian women musicians, many of wh-om have been overshadowed by their male counterparts and seldom get the acclaim they des-erve,” the festival programme explains.