Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra No. 2

Ravi Shankar's "Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra No. 2," subtitled "Raga-Mala" (Garland of Ragas), is the maestro's grand experiment in marrying Hindustani classical improvisation to the Western symphonic form. Composed in 1981 for the London Philharmonic, it threads a sequence of distinct ragas through four movements, each evoking a different time of day and emotional weather, with the orchestra reharmonizing modes that were never meant to carry chords. The sitar remains the irreducible center — its sympathetic strings shimmering, the meend (note-bending glides) sliding between pitches with a vocal, weeping expressivity that Western instruments cannot mimic. Emotionally the work moves through serene dawn meditation, playful interplay, and ecstatic, accelerating climaxes where tabla and sitar lock into dazzling rhythmic cycles. Shankar's playing is both architecturally rigorous and rhapsodically free, the tension of improvisation pressing against the fixed orchestral scaffolding. Culturally it stands at the high-water mark of East-meets-West classical fusion, the project of a man who had already taught the Beatles and played Woodstock, here pursuing legitimacy on the concert-hall stage rather than the rock festival. It rewards deep, attentive listening — headphones, a quiet room, eyes closed — where one can follow a single raga's unfolding logic, the slow exposition blooming into rhythmic fire, and sense two musical civilizations straining, sometimes gloriously, to understand one another.