Carnatic music milestone?

I understand some of you may not be interested in South Indian Carnatic Music but I thought you might be willing to spend 10mins of your time to watch our daughter Sharanya (She is the one in the center of vocalists in marroon dhavani) performing with other NRI (Non-Resident Indian) kids at the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana Festival's INAUGURAL CONCERT here in the USA. They made history for the following reasons -

1. This is the first attempt by NRI kids to give a full 3 hour CONCERT with full accompaniments, delivering krithis, kalpanaswarams, ragam, thaanam, pallavi
2. They got the PRIME TIME INAUGURAL CONCERT SLOT for the 30th Anniversary of the festival, which is an honor by itself and they did full justice to the given opportunity
3. They were trained by many legendary musicians and current day artistes of national and international fame. Lessons were given using Skype followed by some on-shore training in the US for a brief period. The kids actually spent just over 24 full hours together as a team before getting on stage to deliver to a jam packed PRESTIGIOUS WAETJEN AUDITORIUM AT THE CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY, Cleveland , Ohio.
4. The concert was attended in FULL by many senior artistes occupying the front 3 rows of the auditorium (Sudha Raghunathan, Dr. N.Ramani, Dr. Nagai Murali, PSN Sir, A.S.Murali sir, Suguna Purushottaman, among many other luminaries)
5. The background stage setting with 6-7 feet tall IDOLS of Saint Tyagaraja flanked by Lord Venkateswara and Padmavathi, enhanced the spirits of everyone in the auditorium which gave a standing ovation to the kids

For some of you who may not be aware , Cleveland Tyagaraja Aradhana festival (www.aradhana.org) has been going on for over 30years and for the past few years has grown to a full scale 10 day festival attempting to get the Madras Music Academy season atmosphere here in the USA. All senior artistes from India and abroad come and perform here. This is also one of the most credible and challenging platform available at a national level to NRI artistes. The State of Ohio celebrates all the 10days as Tyagaraja days and the program kicks off with a message read by one of the elected assembly men on behalf of the state.

Now the climax of this story is that these kids are scheduled to perform at the Academy in Chennai (Madras) in India in the last week of December 2007 or early January 2008 during the season. The group is then travelling to TIRUVAIYARU to perform in front of the SAINT's Samadhi which is a lifetime opportunity. Now if this sounds interesting, and in case you missed watching it on JAYA TV (national channel on Indian television), please click on the URL below and play it on your computer and give your blessings to all these kids who have sacrificed so much to make this ambitious project, breaking all technical, geographical and timezone barriers successful.

http://youtube.com/watch?v<WBR>=t3Oj-UvD6bs

:2thumbsup:

 

Sindhuja and Nivedi,
Thank you so much for your valuable comments and good wishes. The kids and parents worked very hard towards making this possible and certainly comments from knowledgeable viewers (such as yourselves) go a long way in encouraging such endeavours.

VidhyaS