BENGALURU: The well-known Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (SCO) will be presenting the world premiere of  ‘Vistar’, a commissioned work of renowned Indian composer Sandeep Bhagwati, this weekend. The 70-year-old organisation will be performing for the second time in the city. Under the direction of concertmaster Bogdan Božović, the SCO will also play works of German composers Bach and Brahms.

Bhagwati describes Vistar as a pair of compositions for string orchestra that can be performed separately or simultaneously. “Vistar [on Tanpura] can be played even by amateur musicians - it yields a rich and ever-changing drone. Vistar [on Prakriya] is for a professional orchestra – a cosmos of melodies that slowly unfold. Both scores, while written out, also depend on the creative contributions by performers - they are what I call, comprovisations,” he says.

Bhagwati adds that he designed this work when he learned that Dr Ashok Ranade, India’s pre-eminent musicologist, had passed away, in 2011. “In a spontaneous outburst, I wrote a collection of melodies inspired by various raags, a piece called ‘Alaap for Ashok’. On the score sheets, I arranged these melodies in a non-hierarchical fashion, so that musicians could freely switch from one to another, go back or jump ahead,” he says. Bhagwati explains that ‘Remember’ melodies should incorporate well-known older melodies that mean something to the player, ‘Hope’ melodies should be improvised in an experimental way that extrapolate their inner quirks into a new mode of playing.

On playing in India
Markus Korselt, general and artistic director, SCO, says coming to India is always special. “We have great respect for its culture and we feel like coming home since the audience is really enthusiastic. We hope the audience will enjoy this concert, which unites music from both the countries,” he says.Korselt started as a cellist, playing with orchestras like Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and always knew he wanted to become a general director and conductor. “As a conductor, I worked mostly with chamber orchestras in Germany and symphony orchestras in China. As cultural manager, I was happy to work for Saarland State Theatre, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, some concert series in Austria and Germany, until I came to SCO in 2017,” he recalls. 

Over the years
According to Korselt, their orchestra is the oldest chamber orchestra, founded in 1945, but today most of the musicians are in their thirties. “We put a strong focus on developing a specific way of playing. Our sound is based on tradition but faces modern expectations like the ability to use specific historically informed ways of playing the respective repertoire. This means quite a lot, because our repertoire starts at 17th century and ends today,” he explains.

In the early years, the repertoire had a strong focus on only a few composers like Bach. Today, it ranges from Bach to contemporary composers and genres of jazz and electronic music. He says digitisation hasn’t really posed a threat to orchestra or classical music scene. In fact, the SCO is currently developing a project with artificial intelligence. “It is a thrilling opportunity to make classical music ready for the future,” he says.