Inside the Kremlin

"Inside the Kremlin" captures Ravi Shankar at his most diplomatically adventurous, a sitar virtuoso reaching across the Cold War divide toward Russian soil. Recorded during his late-1980s collaborations with Soviet musicians, the piece sets his ragas against the deep, choral gravity of Russian folk ensembles and orchestral strings — two ancient musical languages, Hindustani classical and Slavic, discovering shared roots in modal melody and call-and-response. The sitar's voice is unmistakable: those liquid meend glissandos, the buzzing sympathetic strings, phrases that unspool with patient improvisatory logic before the tabla's tihai locks them into rhythmic cycles. Underneath, Russian voices and strings supply a darker, more massed sonority than Indian accompaniment usually allows, giving the work an unexpected solemnity, almost ceremonial. Emotionally it moves from meditative stillness to surging exaltation, the architecture of a raga's slow alap blossoming into rhythmic ecstasy. The cultural context is the whole story — this is music as cultural diplomacy, made when Shankar (already the man who'd carried Indian classical music to the West via the Beatles and Monterey) turned eastward, dissolving political borders through sound. Best heard with headphones and full attention, late at night, when you have the patience to follow a melody that takes its time and rewards you for staying.