Toronto Symphony Orchestra: Shankar’s Sitar. Philip Glass: “Meetings Along the Edge” from Passages (Canadian Première); Beethoven: Symphony No. 8; R. Shankar: Sitar Concerto No. 2 “Raga-Mala”. Gustavo Gimeno, conductor, with Anouska Shankar, sitar. May 22, 2026 at Roy Thomson Hall.
Ravi Shankar was a household name in my childhood home in Tehran, largely through my father’s admiration for the musician and his fascination with Indian culture.
On certain weekends the house would fill with recordings of ragas and the smell of freshly ground garam masala as he attempted to create an authentically Indian atmosphere within an unmistakably Iranian setting. Somehow, adding garam masala and Indian raga to Tehran felt entirely natural.
Ravi Shankar: Sitar Concerto No. 2 “Raga-Mala”
That odd fusion of things that perhaps should not go together and yet somehow do returned to mind during the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Shankar’s Second Concerto for Sitar, featuring the composer’s daughter Anoushka under the baton of Gustavo Gimeno.
But is this kind of East-West synthesis no more appetizing than a vindaloo pizza or a chicken tikka bolognese?
The question may sound facetious, but it lies close to the complicated legacy of the “world music” idealism of the 1960s and 70s, when cultural crossover was imagined as both spiritually elevating and politically liberating. Today, such encounters can still feel invigorating but at the same time faintly queasy, weighed down by suspicions of exoticism, appropriation, and unequal exchange. Still, perhaps there remains something admirable in that older optimism: the belief that traditions — and, symbolically, nations — could genuinely meet rather than merely rub up against one another.
Shankar père was at once a revered classical musician, an international celebrity, and a countercultural icon. Anoushka, though charismatic and commanding in her own right, projects a more contemporary presence: less a mystical guru figure, more a poised, cosmopolitan virtuoso.
Her playing throughout the Concerto was dazzlingly controlled, particularly in the subtle bending of pitches and the speed and clarity of her ornamentation. Yet there was also restraint, avoiding the kind of ecstatic abandon we used to associate with her father.
Premiered in New York in 1981 with Zubin Mehta, the Second Concerto, subtitled Raga-Mala (“Garland of Ragas”), is itself an extravagant hybrid.
Across nearly an hour, it strings together 29 ragas over four sprawling movements: one in the first movement, five in the second, three in the third, and no fewer than 20 in the finale where some pass by almost as fleeting samples. The effect borders on psychedelic, heightened further by José Luis Greco’s kaleidoscopic orchestration. The percussion section alone seemed endless — wind machine, bongos, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone and much else besides. Celesta and harp frequently emerged as alter egos to the sitar, while solo winds occasionally mirrored or shadowed its lines. Despite the amplification of the solo instrument, the balance at Roy Thomson Hall was impressively natural, thanks not least to Gimeno’s alert yet discreet handling of the orchestra.
The structure, however, proved less convincing. Much of the work unfolds as alternating bursts of orchestral interjections and sitar solos, punctuated by episodes of dialogue between the soloist and orchestral principals — particularly a warmly received exchange with concertmaster Jonathan Crow.
Yet, amid this abundance of material, what is missing is precisely the temporal expansiveness and meditative suspension that ragas can evoke so powerfully. Ironically, despite its considerable duration, the concerto rarely settles long enough into any one musical space to build into transcendence. Everything moves restlessly onward. As a catalogue of ragas, it succeeds admirably; as an immersion into their spiritual and emotional depth, rather less so. Or is this reaction just a token of Western impatience imposed upon a tradition whose power often lies in duration, stillness and gradual revelation?
Curiously, transcendence was suggested most vividly in Anoushka Shankar’s relatively concise encore, where time finally seemed to open outward rather than pressing forward and taking us nowhere.
The concert’s overarching theme, as Gimeno suggested in his pre-concert remarks, was repetition: how small musical cells can generate the meditative unfolding of a raga, the hypnotic patterns of minimalism, or an entire Beethoven symphony. In that sense, the first half became an inadvertent lesson in how repetition can either fail or succeed.
Philip Glass: Meetings Along the Edge
Opening the evening was Philip Glass’s Meetings Along the Edge, adapted from his 1990 Passages, a collaborative album with Shankar and hence an astute piece of programming.
Built from two themes by Shankar and one by Glass himself, the piece demonstrated many of the limitations of American minimalism at its most formulaic: repetition drained of tension, motion without destination, cliche heaped upon cliche.
The result felt strangely anonymous, neither fully Glass nor fully Shankar, and never quite escaped the atmosphere of self-indulgent background music.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 8
Then came Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and the clearest demonstration of how economy can generate not just aimlessness but exhilaration.
Gimeno’s interpretation was stylish, disciplined and refreshingly unsentimental. It may not have aimed for overwhelming grandeur, but its focus became its strength. The non-vibrato string sound lent clarity and propulsion to the texture, while the finale raced forward at a pace that occasionally flirted with untidiness, but justified itself as unstoppable creative energy.
The orchestra’s responsiveness was impressive throughout: alert, transparent, and utterly committed to Gimeno’s finely judged sense of architecture, it made for a thrilling reminder that maximal effect can emerge from the most economical means, provided only that skill and imagination take the lead over good intentions.
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