I spent the first weekend of this month in Mumbai attending the opening concert of the Spring 2024 concert season of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI).

The season concert programme was quite daunting to any orchestra and is an indicator of the maturity and gravitas the SOI has reached in a remarkably short time span. The concert I attended on 2 February had on offer the contemplative Nocturne from Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, followed by Johannes Brahms’ formidable First Piano Concerto (Barry Douglas, soloist); and after the interval, Mendelssohn’s effervescent Fourth Symphony (the ‘Italian’) conducted by Gergely Madaras.

I wish I could have stayed on for the rest of the season: 6 February (Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and Second Symphony; Kodály’s ‘Dances of Galánta’; Gergely Madaras conducting); 11 February (Hector Berlioz: Overture, Royal Hunt & Storm from The Trojans; and Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights) and Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 “Organ Symphony”; Sasha Cooke soprano, Martyn Brabbins conducting); and 16 February (Richard Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman; Edward Elgar Cello Concerto; and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony; the “Pastorale”; Bryan Cheng cello, Martyn Brabbins conducting).

This is a formidable sequence of repertoire spaced for any orchestra just a few days apart. In season after season, year after year, the SOI continues to attract a stellar line-up of world-renowned soloists and conductors, tacit acknowledgement of the respect the orchestra has garnered in the rarefied world of classical music across the globe.

The Symphony Orchestra of India, based at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, is India’s first and only professional orchestra.

It was founded in 2006 by NCPA Chairman Khushroo N. Suntook and internationally-renowned violin virtuoso Marat Bisengaliev, who serves as the Orchestra’s Music Director.

Several years before this, in my England years, I had encountered the dazzling wizardry of Marat Bisengaliev through two of his compact discs. The first had him playing the Polish virtuoso violinist, composer and pedagogue Henryk Wieniawski’s two technically demanding violin concertos and his ‘Faust’ fantasy (Fantaisie brillante sur Faust de Gounod, Op. 20) with the Polish National Radio Symphony (Katowice) under the baton of the celebrated Antoni Wit.

The second CD was also all-Wieniawski: his showpieces for violin and piano (John Lenehan).

I would listen to Bisengaliev’s playing over and over, at home and while driving to work, never dreaming that he would one day soon be such a game-changer for the standard of the performance and milieu for western classical music in my own country, and that I would in a few years be interacting with him and the rest of his team.

The SOI has worked with such renowned conductors as Carlo Rizzi, Martyn Brabbins, Charles Dutoit, Yuri Simonov, Jacek Kaspszyk, Lior Shambadal, Rafael Payare, Richard Farnes, Laurent Petitgirard, Alpesh Chauhan, Duncan Ward, Karl Jenkins, Mischa Damev, Evgeny Bushkov, Alexander Lazarev, Christoph Poppen, and more. Soloists appearing with the SOI have included Maria João Pires, Augustin Dumay, Simon O’Neill, Cédric Tiberghien, Alina Ibragimova, Stephen Hough, Stephen Kovacevich, Barry Douglas, Benjamin Grosvenor, Pavel Kolesnikov, Angel Blue, Zakir Hussain, Béla Fleck, Tamás Vásáry, and Lena Neudauer, amongst others.

International tours have seen the SOI perform in Moscow; Muscat; and Abu Dhabi. In 2016, the SOI presented three sold-out concerts in Switzerland. Le Temps hailed “the commitment, the enthusiasm, and the discipline of this ensemble, which played with ferocious energy and appetite.” In 2019, the SOI embarked on a six-concert tour to the United Kingdom, performing to delighted audiences in prestigious venues in London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Guildford, and Edinburgh, and garnering rave reviews. In 2023, the SOI returned to the UK to perform nine concerts across eight cities.

Apart from the mainstays of the symphonic repertoire, the NCPA and SOI have also presented large-scale productions, including fully-staged opera productions of Tosca, Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, and Madama Butterfly. In 2017, the SOI premiered a highly-acclaimed, innovative new production of La Bohème, conducted by Carlo Rizzi, featuring an international star cast, which was streamed globally on OperaVision. Most recently, a fully-staged production of Die Fledermaus was presented in 2022, in collaboration with the Hungarian State Opera.

The Orchestra’s core group of musicians is resident at the NCPA all year round and forms the SOI Chamber Orchestra. Additional players are recruited from a talented pool of professionals from around the world. The SOI Chamber Orchestra performs a regular series of concerts through the year at the NCPA and elsewhere around Mumbai and India. A monthly concert series at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, the first regular music series there, has been running for nearly a decade. National tours have seen the SOI Chamber Orchestra perform in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Dehradun, and Pune, amongst other cities.

The Orchestra places great emphasis on education. Many SOI musicians are also teachers, working to develop the musical potential amongst young people in India. Musicians of the SOI conduct workshops, masterclasses and teacher-training programmes in various cities and a traineeship programme nurtures the talent of young musicians from around the country. Chief amongst the Orchestra’s educational initiatives is the SOI Music Academy which brings a professional level of teaching, previously not available in India, to gifted young musicians. Several graduates of the Academy are now pursuing music further in leading conservatories around the world and can often be heard performing as part of the SOI. Together, these programmes aim to raise the standard of Western classical music performance in India and grow the number of Indian musicians in the SOI.

Had the SOI been around in the 1980s, my own life trajectory would have been so different. I would have endeavoured to join its ranks immediately after finishing high school, and not chosen to pursue medicine. I keep telling GenNext that they don’t know how fortunate they are to have such a heaven-sent opportunity. Where else in India (or elsewhere on our subcontinent for that matter) can one hear, live, to world-class standard, a Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler or Sibelius symphony and so much more in the orchestral and chamber repertoire? And to actually be given a chance to be part of making such exhilarating music, I can think of no greater high than that.

That our very own maestro Zubin Mehta was so impressed with the high standard of the SOI when he conducted the orchestra last September says a lot. “I hope that other cities in India take an example and take inspiration from what’s happening in Mumbai,” he said. Goa, are you listening?

We at Child’s Play India Foundation have been in talks with the SOI since our inception, and I am so glad that their first music camp in Goa in collaboration with us  was such a success that they are returning again this year (26 February to 3 March) with a string quartet (two violinists, a violist and a cellist) to engage with our youth, to teach students and to help teachers with technique and so many other matters musical.

I am confident that this partnership will grow ever stronger and will soon include assistance with other orchestral instruments, the woodwinds and brass. Such a valuable outreach on such fertile soil as Goa will certainly reap a rich harvest! 

(An edited version of this article was published on 25 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)