Sala degli Arazzi, 7pm
Free entrance while seats last

Continuing its policy of a special focus on Indian music and dance, the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (IICMS) has organised a concert in March 2015 to be given by the celebrated virtuoso Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on mohan veena, accompanied by Krishna Mohan Bhatt on sitar and Nihar Metha on tabla. Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt is a leading interpreter of the Hindustan musical tradition and an internationally renowned musician.

Born at Jaipur in Rajasthan, India in July 1952, he was principally educated by his father Manmohan Bhatt. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt is a virtuoso on the mohan veena, an instrument that he made himself. The name is a combination of his own surname and the word vina or veena, the generic Sanskrit term for stringed instruments. Basically a kind of hybrid of the Spanish classical guitar and the Indian sitar, the mohan veena is rather like the Western slide guitar since it is played by plucking strings with a plectrum and using a “steel” (metal bar). Nonetheless, the fusion of the melody, drones and strings resonating in sympathy and the microtonal approach to melody clearly place this instrument in the Indian musical context.

Vishwa Mohan Bhatt is well known both in India and abroad. He acquired great international renown when he performed with the American slide guitarist and composer Ry Cooder on the recording of A Meeting by the River, which won a Grammy Award as the best album of world music in 1994. He has also played with many other leading Western musicians, including Taj Mahal, Bela Fleck and Jerry Douglas, and has won major awards, such as the Padma Shri Prize and the Sangeet Natak Academy Prize.