Musical Anecdotes—43
43.Sanjay Subrahmanyan ( 21 / 1 / 1968….)
Sanjay Subrahmanyan is a Carnatic vocalist who has performed widely in India and overseas and has won many awards for his performances. He was born in Chennai and began learning music at the age of seven. Initial training was under V. Lakshminarayana on the violin as well as in vocal music. He later switched to vocal music and was trained by Rukmini Rajagopalan for a period of almost eight years. He learnt from senior Guru Calcutta K.S.Krishnamurthy for 10 years until his demise in 1999. He then continued to study under Nadaswaram maestro Semponarkoil Vaidyanathan until his demise in 2013.
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Apparently, when he was one-and-a-half, he exclaimed at a Lalgudi Jayaraman concert that he wanted to play the violin like the maestro.My mother took me seriously and, some years later, she dropped me off at the nearest violin class. But after a while, his guru left for the US, and Sanjay suffered a couple of accidents one from playing football in a basketball court with a tennis ball and the other from falling down in the steeple chase pit at Rajarathnam Stadium. With those injuries, Sanjay could no longer play the violin, and he shifted to training in vocal music, under his grand-aunt.
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Sanjay teaches music, and his students include such as Prashanth Viswanathan, Swarna Rethas, Sandeep Narayan, and Prasanna Venkatraman.
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He has performed in Chennai as well as in Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore, Delhi and other places in India. He has toured Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, US, Canada, UK, Switzerland and Oman. He is the first Carnatic vocal artiste to perform twice at the prestigious Theatre De La Ville, Paris. Sanjay was also the sole representative of the Carnaticmusic tradition at the La Marde Musicas festival at Cartagena, Spain.
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Sanjay is a musician, whose music is a happy and healthy synthesis of the traits in the styles of many maestros of the past, but not even for a moment appearing to be imitative of anybody. He is an achiever in all branches of classical music like fine awareness of sruti values, grip on the idiom of ragas and rhythm, a rich repertory of classical compositions, a mind open to new ideas and an unfailing sense of aesthetics. Sanjay has been acclaimed as one of the most serious exponents of Carnatic music in his generation.
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His life has also been the subject of a documentary movie Aaraar aasaippadaar made by the filmmaker Prasanna Ramaswamy. The movie received rave reviews. To his credit Sanjay Subramaniam has also released several CDs and cassettes. Through this he has established his role of spreading and promoting Indian classical music across the globe.
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He has amassed many awards-- "Gaana Padhmam" from the Brahma Gana Sabha ; "Vani-kala-sudhakara" from Tyaga Brahma Gana Sabha ;Kalaimamani award from the Tamil Nadu Government . He is an 'A Top' Grade artiste of A I R Madras ,He received the Yuva Kala Bharathi title from Bharat Kalachar,
Sanjay is a Chartered Accountant and a rank-holding Cost Accountant.
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Said Sanjay in an interview, "Tamil is a language I have grown to love much more in the last few years. You spend 35 years reading the English newspaper every day, getting access to all kinds of English literature, and ignoring Tamil almost completely. Only when my children started going to school did I realise what I was missing out on." At a concert he gave for the Devan Trust Sanjay was given a complete set of Devan's books Thuppariyum Sambu and other works, and this changed his whole concept of literature .
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"If music had not claimed him, Sanjay would have definitely become a computer whiz. He knows all about downloads and uploads and telnets and has an account on just about any website," says the introduction to Sanjay in the website he created www,sangeetham,com This popular site is a joy for Carnatic music lovers. It has interviews with artists, profiles, information on ragas, words of kritis and a lot more. "When I'm not at a concert or dropping off my children to school, tennis class or something like that, I'm at the computer, working on this site," says Sanjay who is helped by wife Aarthi and their friends Sarada and Sriram.
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A RARE FOTO OF CARNATIC AND FILM SINGERS. PPR
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