I’ve been remiss in not mentioning the fact that this weekend will bring a world premiere to Princeton, courtesy of composer William Harvey and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. Harvey will be the violin soloist in his new concerto, “Seven Decisions of Gandhi,” to be performed on two concerts at Richardson Auditorium this Saturday and Sunday.
Long an admirer of Gandhi, whose nonviolent resistance movement helped end British rule in India, Harvey was intrigued by the fact that the influential reformer and revolutionary was also once a violinist. He muses, “Had Gandhi decided to stick with the violin, world history might be very different. This gave me the idea that a violin concerto about his life could be based on decisions that made him the international nonviolence icon he is today.”
Dibyarka Chatterjee will accompany on the tabla, traditional Indian hand-drums, and Snehesh Nag will play the sitar. Sameer Patel will conduct.
The work is dedicated Gandhi’s granddaughter, Ela, on the occasion of her 80th birthday.
Also on the program will be Alexander Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique.”
The concerts will be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. A pre-concert talk will take place one hour before the Sunday performance. For tickets and information, visit princetonsymphony.org.
More about William Harvey
Dibyarka Chatterjee
Snehesh Nag
https://www.viewcy.com/p/sneheshnag
Sameer Patel
PHOTO: William Harvey and Dibyarka Chatterjee at last night’s PSO Soundtracks talk, “Instruments of the Indian Subcontinent,” at Princeton Public Library