Sitar master Imrat Khan to present Sterne Virtuoso Concert

One of India's most accomplished traditional musicians will perform a sitar recital at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at Skidmore. 

Imrat Khan, a master of both sitar and surbahar (bass sitar), will play with tabla accompaniment by Nitin Mitta in a Sterne Virtuoso Series performance in the Arthur Zankel Music Center's Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall.

General admission for the concert will be $12, and $5 for students.Tickets are available online. Also, the Zankel Music Center box office will sell tickets for this event from noon to 2 p.m. Thursday, April 21, and noon to 3 p.m. Friday, April 22.

Born in Calcutta, Ustad (maestro or teacher) Khan's family traces its musical pedigree back for many generations, to the court musicians of the Mughal rulers of the 16 ^th century. His late father, Enayat Khan, and his grandfather, Imdad Khan, were recognized as leading sitar players of their time.

Imrat Khan's uncle, Wahid Khan, taught Imrat and his older brother, Vilayat Khan, in the family style, which is known as the Imdadkhani Gharana (school). Vilayat and Imrat performed together for many years, but from the 1960s on, Imrat has performed and recorded solo.

He also teaches classical Indian music and instructs sitar students at Washington University in St. Louis. Among past students were Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and George Harrison of the Beatles, who helped introduce the instrument to the Western world.

The sitar is a plucked stringed instrument, predominantly used in Hindustani classical music since the Middle Ages. 

Skidmore Music Professor Gordon R. Thompson, an ethnomusicologist who is faculty sponsor for the concert by Ustad Imrat Khan, said the Khan family's style of playing evokes the elegance of India's royal courts in its richness and sophistication, "which should be in perfect resonance with the Zankel Music Center's concert hall."

Thompson first heard recordings of Ustad Imrat Khan while an undergraduate in Canada."I had already heard recordings by Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan - but, where they adapted their playing to please Western audiences, Imrat Khan and his late brother Vilayat Khan revealed an entirely new, uncompromised music to me," Thompson recalls. "Only after learning to play a bit of sitar did I begin to appreciate the sophistication of their instrumental technique and its subtle intricacies: in particular, Imrat Khan's soulful mastery of the sitar's challenges - especially the pulling of the melody string to produce precise glides from one note to the next?evokes the family's heritage."

While a graduate student at UCLA, Thompson had the honor of playing tabla during a lecture-demonstration by Khan.

Mitta, Khan's accompanist, is currently a top tabla player known as an artist who combines technical virtuosity, spontaneity, clarity of tone, and sensitivity to melodic nuance.

A highly sought-after accompanist who has performed with some of India's most celebrated musicians, Mitta has also made a mark as a versatile musician in other spheres, as his most recent collaboration with 2010 Grammy nominee Vijay Iyer and guitarist Prasanna on their new album, "Tirtha," demonstrates.

Mitta received his early training in Hyderabad from Pandit G. Satyanarayana. In his years as a tabla student, he won many accolades, including the first prize in Calcutta's All-India Competition.

On moving to the United States in 2002, Mitta received a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He has taught at the Learn Quest Academy of Music in Waltham, Mass. Now a resident of New York City, he is actively involved in teaching, performing, recording, and conducting tabla workshops.