Dr. Luis Dias
The Symphony Orchestra of India concluded its 2025 Spring Season last month. The first four concerts, co-hosted with the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, were conducted by India’s towering contribution to the world of western classical music, maestro Zubin Mehta.
On January 25, 2025, the concert programme featured Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b, Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 21 by Frideric Chopin (Alexander Gadjiev, piano) and Antonin Dvorák’s Symphony No. 7,
Op. 70.
The February 1, 2025 concert presented two war-horses of the symphonic repertoire: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (Johannes Brahms) and Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky).
The third and fourth concerts of the Spring 2025 Season (February7 and 9 2025) saw over 200 musicians onstage coming together for two Opera Gala concerts featuring excerpts from ‘Carmen’ by Bizet and La Traviata
by Verdi.
This grand spectacle brought together four internationally renowned soloists: Roberta Mantegna, graduate from the Teatro dell’Opera’s “Fabbrica” project and highly acclaimed soprano; Olesya Petrova, winner of the Paris Opera Competition renowned for her rich velvet mezzo-soprano voice; Luciano Ganci, considered to be Italy’s finest Verdi tenor; and Roman baritone, George Petean, one of the most sought-after singers in the operatic world. The concert also featured Mumbai-based choir ‘Living Voices’ and children’s choir ‘The Singing Tree Choir’ of the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation.
Considered one of the greatest tragic operas of the 19th century, ‘Carmen’, conveys the story of the irresistibly fascinating gypsy girl who deserts her soldier-lover for a strutting bull fighter through risqué themes and violence in a Spanish setting. Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, is a romantic tragedy about Parisian courtesan, Violetta, who attempts to leave the life she knows behind, to try and finally find true love.
The closing concert of the season on February 15, 2025, had at the helm Sir Mark Elder, one of Britain’s most acclaimed conductors and conductor emeritus of The Hallé Orchestra with 63 appearances at the BBC Proms. The concert began with the Overture to ‘Oberon’, the romantic opera by Carl Maria von Weber; followed by the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Schumann’s symphonic work for orchestra, which has “an overall light and friendly character.” The concert culminated with one of Beethoven’s most celebrated works, the Eroica Symphony (Symphony No. 3, Op. 55),a composition “celebrating the memory of a great man – making revolution personal.”
I went to this last concert, and was also fortunate enough to attend the rehearsal that morning. It was like watching and listening to a masterclass in action, the way he went over the minutest details of the Eroica in particular, which bristled with energy at the concert. The other two works bubbled over like freshly opened sparkling champagne, to use Sir Elder’s own analogy from his
pre-concert speech.
Founded in 2006 by chairman of NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts) Mumbai, Khushroo N. Suntook and internationally-renowned violin virtuoso Marat Bisengaliev, who serves as the Orchestra’s music director, the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) will be 20 years old next year, and it is quite staggering to behold their trajectory in that time span. Since our return to India in 2008, I have tried to go to at least one of their concerts each year, sometimes more often, to attend concerts at each of their
biannual seasons.
The SOI has worked with such renowned conductors as Carlo Rizzi, Martyn Brabbins, Charles Dutoit, Yuri Simonov, Jacek Kaspszyk, Lior Shambadal, Rafael Payare, Richard Farnes, Laurent Petitgirard, Alpesh Chauhan, Duncan Ward, Karl Jenkins, Mischa Damev, Evgeny Bushkov, Alexander Lazarev, Christoph Poppen, and more. Soloists appearing with the SOI have included Maria João Pires, Augustin Dumay, Simon O’Neill, Cédric Tiberghien, Alina Ibragimova, Stephen Hough, Stephen Kovacevich, Barry Douglas, Benjamin Grosvenor, Pavel Kolesnikov, Angel Blue, Zakir Hussain, Béla Fleck, Tamás Vásáry, and Lena Neudauer, among others.
International tours have seen the SOI perform in Moscow; Muscat; and Abu Dhabi. In 2016, the SOI presented three sold-out concerts in Switzerland. Le Temps hailed “the commitment, the enthusiasm, and the discipline of this ensemble, which played with ferocious energy and appetite.” In 2019, the SOI embarked on a six-concert tour to the United Kingdom, performing to delighted audiences in prestigious venues in London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Guildford, and Edinburgh, and garnering rave reviews. In 2023, the SOI returned to the U.K. to perform nine concerts across eight cities.
Apart from the mainstays of the symphonic repertoire, the NCPA and SOI have also presented large-scale productions, including fully-staged opera productions of ‘Tosca’, ‘Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci’, and ‘Madama Butterfly’. In 2017, the SOI premiered a highly-acclaimed, innovative new production of ‘La Bohème’, conducted by Carlo Rizzi, featuring an international star cast, which was streamed globally on OperaVision. Most recently, a fully-staged production of ‘Die Fledermaus’ was presented in 2022, in collaboration with the Hungarian State Opera.
The Orchestra’s core group of musicians is resident at the NCPA all year round and forms the SOI Chamber Orchestra. Additional players are recruited from a talented pool of professionals from around the world. The SOI Chamber Orchestra performs a regular series of concerts through the year at the NCPA and elsewhere around Mumbai and India. A monthly concert series at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, the first regular music series there, has been running for nearly a decade. National tours have seen the SOI Chamber Orchestra perform in Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Dehradun, and Pune, among other cities.
The Orchestra places great emphasis on education. Many SOI musicians are also teachers, working to develop the musical potential among young people in India. Musicians of the SOI conduct workshops, masterclasses and teacher-training programmes in various cities and a traineeship programme nurtures the talent of young musicians from around the country. Chief among the Orchestra’s educational initiatives is the SOI Music Academy which brings a professional level of teaching, previously not available in India, to gifted young musicians. Several graduates of the Academy are now pursuing music further in leading conservatories around the world and can often be heard performing as part of the SOI. Together, these programmes aim to raise the standard of Western classical music performance in India and grow the number of Indian musicians in the SOI.
I keep telling GenNext that they don’t know how fortunate they are to have such a heaven-sent opportunity. Where else in India (or elsewhere on our subcontinent for that matter) can one hear, live, to world-class standard, a Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler or Sibelius symphony and so much more in the orchestral and chamber repertoire? And to actually be given a chance to be part of making such exhilarating music, I can think of no greater high than that.
We at Child’s Play India Foundation have been in communication with the SOI since our inception, and we are honoured to welcome their musicians for the third successive year (March 17 to 21, 2025) at our premises in St. Inez, Panaji, to teach students and to help teachers with technique and so many other matters musical.
May the bond between Goa and the SOI grow ever stronger! It is in Goa’s own interest that this happens.
