The Enchanting "Nanu Palimpa" in Viola (1975) & Vocal (1980)🔸Mohana🔹Tyagaraja 🔹 M Balamuralikrishna

💐Hello! Namaskaram,

🔸Welcome to the album “The Enchanting Nanu Pālimpa in Viola & Vocal”. May I invite you to consider doing an experiment in listening to an exquisite album which portrays the two faces of melody – viola & vocal of Mangalampalli Balamuralikrishna?

🔹First, I would like to offer my sincere thanks and admiration to Sri. Mangalampalli Muralikrishna of Amalapuram, who has curated this old recording from a live viola concert held in 1975. His meticulous documentation and diligent handling of the cassette tapes have ensured transfer of music to this platform.

As I started to clean the audio and began to work on the other aspects of sound quality, the tonal purity of viola and the musical aspects presented in this live concert virtually enveloped me. As I listened to his playing and each time as I did, it presented me a new perspective that was not observed earlier.

🔸The listening experience of this immortal composition of Saint Tyagaraja, in the rāga Móhana was both entertaining and thought provoking.

🔹Dr. Balamuralikrishna’s (BMK) idiom of presentation encompasses the means for achieving the best possible aesthetic appeal. Some sangatīs of Móhana and the movements of rāga delineation in his viola are so fresh and unique. To observe, if such a thing was also sung by him, I researched and selected a vocal rendition from a radio broadcast of 1980 and listened to both the viola and vocal renditions in tandem.

🔸Quoting his own words on the vastness of music, “avaniló mana sangeetamu avadhulu léni sāgaramu,” — our music is a boundary-less ocean on this earth. BMK’s vocal and viola renditions seem to represent such an expanse. If his vocal music could represent the colour of the ocean in northern hemisphere, his viola playing gives us the warmth of the ocean in southern hemisphere.
Each hemisphere, the vocal or viola, is not incomplete, but when we listen to them both in tandem, it enriches our listening experience and enlarges our perspective of Muralīgānam.

🔹What surprises me most is, why did we not get to witness live viola concerts as much as the vocal concerts of BMK in the last 40 years or so? Some of my friends, including Sri. Muralikrisha gāru shared that, in the several hundreds of concerts of 1940s and 1950s, BMK has been accompanying on the violin for many great musicians of yore including his guru Paruppalli Ramakrishnayya Panthulu. In the late 1960s to mid 1970s, he performed both as a viola solo artist and vocalist in a concert series, i.e., two concerts in a series, one each on viola and vocal. In the later period, only vocal concerts were performed with an occasional viola concert in All India Radio.

🔸On listening to a piece in both viola and vocal in tandem, I gather, we as rasikās have missed some aspects of Muralīgānam in the music that was rendered in 1980s and onwards. I really wonder, how the organisers and rasikās let go the effect of combo concerts.

🔹I am aware that this album is a miniscule example to describe the ocean like music of BMK, but listening to it would certainly show us, how to get a wholesome listening experience.
“Lose yourself in music!”

00:00 -
00:00:06 ❇️ Viola - Nanu Pālimpa - Rāga Móhana - Tyagaraja (1975)
00:30:18 ❇️ Vocal - Nanu Pālimpa - Rāga Móhana - Tyagaraja (1980)