Every year, Sree Ramaseva Mandali decorates a senior artiste with the S V Narayanaswamy Rao National Award. It is given during the annual Sri Ramanavami music season.
Last year, it was given to vocalist T V Sankaranarayan.
This year, the honour went to the Bombay Sisters - Saroja and Lalitha.
At a function held under the Big Top on Sunday, April 1 evening, former union minister and Bengalurean S. M. Krishna did the honours.
Speaking to a fairly large audience, Saroja said awards were a time to say thank you to many people. First to their parents. Said Saroja, "Our father was an ardent music rasika and while he did all he could to arrange for our music education he was keen to see us as concert artistes."
She also made special mention of two gurus - Musiri Subramania Iyer who took them under his wings when the duo came to Madras to study at the Music College. And later, for many years, Prof. Govinda Rao.
She also paid tribute to their families, "for understanding the times of festivals and social functions we had to skip for concert tours".
The sisters who hail from Kerala, then moved to Bombay and then to Madras had their first concert in the early 1960s when the great Madurai Mani Iyer could not perform at a concert and the sisters were invited to take his place.
Theirs had been a musical journey for over five decades now. The sisters presented a concert after the awards ceremony and S M Krishna stayed on to listen to much of it,
No comments:
Post a Comment