Two years ago, the English composer Michael Nyman travelled to India for a research project funded by the British Council. His intention was to explore the huge array of Indian music, make contact with potential collaborators and see what happened. The results were unveiled in Salford last week. Sangam: The Meeting Point, a one-off performance that marked the end of Manchester's cultural programme for the Commonwealth Games, saw Nyman appear with a small, select group of Indian virtuosi alongside his usual 11-piece orchestra.
The first half featured a collaboration with young mandolin player U Shrinivas, a terrifyingly accomplished musician. The mandolin may be an unusual instrument of choice for an Indian, but in Shrinivas's hands it became a fascinating hybrid of sitar and blues guitar. He coaxed from it unearthly sliding effects before letting loose with the kind of blurred chromatic finger-work beloved of heavy metal guitarists.
The piece itself was typical Nyman: all sawing strings, jagged piano ostinatos and fractal complexity. Beyond a few pentatonic motifs, the composer's old ideas and concepts seemed entirely unaffected by his immersion in Indian music. Consequently, Shrinivas's brilliantly ostentatious improvising often sounded simply like an exotic extra layer in a familiar recipe.
For the second half, Nyman was joined by the singers Rajan and Sajan Misra, two of India's most revered khyal vocalists. Together with a tabla player and a sitarist, they performed two raga-like pieces of astonishing beauty, their precisely trained voices full of ancient mystery.
Throughout the evening Nyman's band kept a low profile, the violins and horns often maintaining a drone effect while Nyman picked out minimal piano lines. The overall effect was beguiling and attractive, although again there was the feeling that the task of true stylistic integration had been side-stepped. Too much in evidence during the first half, Nyman's idiosyncratic composing style was ironically too absent throughout the second. Still, on a purely performance level, the concert was spellbinding.
