Ravi Shankar: Sukanya

Ravi Shankar began writing his last major work when he was 90. An opera based on an ancient Sanskrit tale from the Mahabharata, it was unfi nished when he died and was completed by his daughter Anoushka and the violinst and conductor David Murphy (a former pupil of Yehudi Menuhin with whom Shankar recorded the groundbreaking 1967 fusion album West Meets East). The full story behind the work and its seamless fusion of musical traditions from East and West was told in #124 and one of its debut performances at London's Royal Festival Hall in May 2017 was reviewed in #129. Three years later we fi nally get a live recording of that performance to coincide with the celebration for the centenary of Shankar's birth. In many ways the opera works better on disc than it did in its semi-staged live incarnation, in which the clunkiness of Amit Chaudhuri's libretto had no hiding place and Aakash Odedra's choreography, while striking, tended to distract from the excellence of Shankar's score.

The recording somehow offers a more unified vision of the work. The LPO, under Murphy's baton, play with an engaging crispness and the choruses provided by the BBC Singers are subtle and nuanced. The Royal Opera House soprano Susanna Hurrell is the show-stealer in the title-role and sings with an intuitive empathy for the percussive Indian rhythms, while Parimal Sadaphal (sitar) and Ashwani Shankar (shenhai) play with soulful virtuosity.