Tāla Tarang at Festival Drayton Centre -- reviewed by John Hargreaves

Tāla Tarang’s combination of harp and tabla, recreating music that originated in different cultures across five continents, gave the Festival Centre audience a musical treat that was nothing short of sensational.

Though Mendi Singh has played on recordings by Peter Gabriel, Courtney Pine, and many others, hearing the tabla live was a new and captivating experience for many. With his three differently-pitched hand drums, each with uniquely layered heads, Mendi created ever-varied streams of complex, expressive, resonant tones.

Eleanor Turner’s experience as both performer and composer has taken the harp on musical adventures to new and exciting places. She clearly revelled in every aspect of her instrument and its capacity, in her hands, for making sounds both rich and nuanced, familiar and surprising.

Playing together, Eleanor and Mendi call themselves Tāla Tarang which means ‘rhythm waves’. They made these waves with a joy that was infectious and created magic.

In their own composition ‘Jugalbandi’ (entwined twins) the two instruments engaged in a sort of healthy competition with each other, before segueing into the calming rhythms of ‘Kaa Fo’, a traditional lullaby from Ghana. In their stunning version of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Norwegian Wood’ the two performers conjured up a sound which married the clarity of a Scandinavian forest with the swirling mysticism of India.

The programme included the presto from J.S. Bach’s first violin sonata, in an appreciative nod to early western classical music. There was a moving version of the desolate plea ‘Che Si Puo Fare’ (‘What Can I Do?’) by seventeenth century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi. The traditional Hungarian dance ‘Bučimiš’ gave a sense of galloping over the steppes. And the harp has surely never sounded so hot and steamy as in their version of Argentinian Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’.

After the controlled rhythmic quickening and crescendo of Ravel’s Bolero, Tāla Tarang ended with an exuberant piece of contemporary musical theatre built around a composition by American harpist Deborah Henson-Conant. It included a stately French ballroom minuet for harp, a stirring Flamenco, and a tabla-driven section representing ‘Gypsies of Rajasthan’ as they travelled from India to Spain, picking up musical influences as they went. It summed up perfectly the sense of delight which underpinned the entire concert.