Music Reviews : Subramaniam, Hussain: Fine Mix

Though there are many similarities in their fusion-enriched careers, the sober violinist Lakshminarayana Subramaniam and the ebullient percussionist Zakir Hussain present very different stage personalities.

But those proved two complementary sides of the same elegant coin, direct from the virtuoso mint, Saturday at Thorne Hall of Occidental College. The Indian musicians delivered a long and astounding evening of Carnatic music, presented by the East-West Cultural Center.

Subramaniam is a master of thematic expansion, seizing the core of a phrase and enlarging it in range and bravura while probing its melodic identity through articulative and timbral stunts. He does not pace the ensuing drama linearly, but rather in climactic waves, each larger than the previous one.

Although thoroughly grounded in traditional styles, there were early hints of his wide range of experience in two kritis --suggestions of blues and bluegrass in one of his own compositions, and intimations of Bachian riffs in a powerfully austere one by St. Tyagaraja.

All questions of influences became moot in his ragam, tanam-pallavi, completely integrated, completely personal statements of astonishing musical and emotional reach.

You’ve heard of talking drums? Well, the tabla of Zakir Hussain also sing and chuckle, creating a virtual comic opera of his one extended solo. Subramaniam’s fiery spiccato double-stops, ornamental slides and distinctive left-hand pizzicato all found equivalent and perfectly matched reflection from the drummer, who has an extraordinary ability to produce bass lines with his left hand.

Subramaniam provided helpful and drily witty introductions to the music. He expressed his surprise that the capacity crowd could be clamoring for an encore at midnight, but he and Hussain honored the demand with a graceful prayer of his own composition.