Carnegie Hall concert review in The New York Times
The New York Times, Tuesday, November 13, 1985
The world Music Institute and New Audiences presented the Indian sitarist Nikhil Banerjee and a troupe of seven professional folk musicians from the Thar Desert of Northwest India at Carnegie Hall on Saturday,providing an inspired evening of music. It is difficult to imagine any better-known Indian performers presenting a program more vital, kaleidoscopic and moving than this one.
Nikhil Banerjee, following this intensely upbeat opening with a classical raga, proved himself a master of the sitar. His long, gorgeous alap, the meditative exposition of the raga, demonstrated that in the proper hands, the sitar can be as subtle and deeply moving an instrument as the veena, its extremely ancient ancestor. And later, as he played cat-and-mouse with the virtuosic tabla drummer Zakir Hussain, the extraordinary fluidity and assurance of his rhythmic ideas and phrasing set a pace and a standard that would have left most of the international 'stars' of Indian music far behind.
© 1986 The New York Times Company
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