Excellent survey of Ravi Shankar's career
L. Topper | 02/08/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"If you really like Ravi Shankar, this is a great set. It has some of his best recordings. It has the complete recordings from the "In Concert" from the World Pacific label. It has some of Shankar's earliest recordings and many of his works in which he spreads out and lets the ragas develop. The sound is really excellent on these recordings.
To be candid, EMI has produced many reissues where they give the record a new title and continue to reissue the same works over and over. If you get this box set, you can leave all of the rest of the EMI recordings alone without getting the same pieces over and over again.
From his earlier pieces, I like Shankar's recordings from the World Pacific label which have been issued as part of a series on Angel records in America. I would recommend them to anyone--especially "In London" and "In New York." I think it is fair to say that Ravi Shankar released a lot of recordings for consumption in the West in which all of the ragas were very short. It is my opinion that he did this to give Western audiences the opportunity to grow accustomed to a new exotic form of music to Western ears. Nikhil Banerjee refused to compromise so that so much of his best works are live performance recordings in which he stretches out. The individual ragas are often an hour in length. I am not sure that American audiences have had the patience to listen to individual songs that lasted that long when Indian music was first being introduced to the West back in the 1950's and 1960's. I think that Ravi Shankar was a very intelligent ambassador for Indian music/culture to the West even though it may have caused him to compromise on the full development of the raga.
This set has a very nice booklet and all of the discs in the set were perfectly fine and played perfectly. I believe that the discs were pressed in England. The recent discs that I have gotten from India on the RPG/Saregama label have frequently been very bad pressings. If you can, try to stick to EMI and Angel and stay away from Saregama. Shankar's recordings on Chhanda Dhara are really quite good discs. In fact, all of the Chhanda Dhara discs are very good productions. I have all of the Nikhil Banerjee recitals on Chhanda Dhara. All of them are very good. I would hate to miss even one of them."
Track Listings (49) - Disc #1