A benchmark Kalyani for now and forever - Tyagaraja's 'sundari nee divya rUpamu'

A benchmark in kalyANI for now and forever!

Here is an excerpt from a celebrated concert of 1963 held in Shanmukhananda Hall, Bombay, featuring Sarvashri Balamuralikrishna together with Lalgudi Jayaraman and Umalyapuram Shivaraman.

Fortunately for the music lovers, many copies of recording from this concert is easily available, but the quality of these has suffered owing to many reasons including the transfer of audio from spool tapes.

Over the last 10 years, with the help of my friends, I might have collected over 50 different copies of the same concert in a hope of finding a better version for the purpose of posterity. On listening these recordings, it became clear to me, that we could select some of the best parts of the recording, from these collections and rebuild an audio with a proper pitch and speed, aiming to reflect the original concert of the yore.

The track presented here is one such endeavour.

The kalyANi track is about 77 minutes and every time I listen to it, some new aspect is revealed to me. It is really a wonder, how such a master piece was created by the maestros live!

I am sure, each well-informed listener like you, has something to share about this kalyANi and I look forward to hear your reflections.