Austrian musicians play at Kalimpong

Kalimpong : A quartet of musicians from Austria today provided a perfect icing to three-days of Teohar (Diwali) celebration.

The faculty members of Bach Music Academy in Vienna comprising its director Hanns Stekel, pianist Mari Naka, violinist Luis Morais and contra-bassist James Rapport were perfection personified as the audience lapped up their music, including a five-minute original composition.

Later, Stekel told The Telegraph that Lost in Performance was a composition of his, inspired by India. “It is a sort of fusion of the Indian and Western classical music. I read a lot about India and listened to a great deal of Indian classical music before composing it,” he said.

If the pieces the quartet played in the second half, including Stekel’s composition, were more peppy, the first half comprised classical pieces by masters of the craft like Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi. “I consider myself very fortunate to have got an opportunity to listen to such high quality music. This concert has made my tihar,” said local MLA Gaulan Lepcha, who is a keen musician himself, and can play the guitar.

His guru, Jeewan Pradhan, was among the audience of about 50 music lovers. “The discipline, quality and precision of the quartet’s performance was amazing,” Pradhan said. He runs a music school, Melody Academy, in Darjeeling.

Young violinist Manoj Tamang rued missing today’s concert because of bhai tika. “I listened to their brief performance at yesterday’s music contest (where the quartet were judges), and they were unbelievable,” said Tamang, who was himself a judge at the audition round of the competition held earlier.

The first instrumental music contest held here yesterday had been organized by My Peace, an NGO. It was won by Prayash Biswakarma of Kalimpong. All of nine years, Prayash played a Vivaldi piece, Spring, on his violin.

Dipankar Singh of Darjeeling and visually-challenged Kalimpong boy Abhishek Rai (both on guitar) bagged the second and third prizes.

Source: The Telegraph