Nitin Sawhney is a wildly versatile workaholic. He is a pianist, guitarist, composer and DJ. His last album, Philtre, mixed anything from Asian themes to blues, gospel and funk, and won the Culture Crossing prize at this month's World Music Awards, despite the fact that Sawhney appears to be uncomfortable with the "world music" tag. No matter. He is influenced by styles from around the world just as much as he is by pop or classical music, and this was the premiere of a brave excursion into world film music.
Behind the stage was a screen, showing the 1929 German-Indian movie A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash),a black-and-white silent film that was directed by the German Franz Osten and is based on a story about love, gambling and treachery from that ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. In front of the screen were the massed ranks of the LSO, with conductor Stephen Hussey wearing headphones to keep the orchestra in sync. In front of them were Sawhney himself, wearing a long black tunic and playing keyboards, and members of his band on anything from tables to guitar.
Osten's film was an engaging, and often charming early epic, making use of massed crowd scenes and an array of exotic animals, from tigers to elephants to camels. Nitin's score involved equal confidence and variety, constantly changing mood and pace, switching from delicate Indian scat vocals to sweeping strings, or from guitar to sudden stirring brass. It was, by necessity, a sometimes frantic technical exercise, but there were passages in which he had time to develop his themes, using the Indian-influenced flute playing of Ashwin Srinivasan and the tabla percussion of Aref Durvesh against the enthusiastic work of the LSO, with stirring, Celtic-sounding melodies added into the mix.
This was great film music that should make for an entertaining DVD. It was presumably not intended as a score that stands on its own, but it showed how the increasingly assured Sawhney is breaking down the barriers between pop, classical and world music. It will be intriguing to see what he does next.
