I came across this blog today, which belongs to a music fan from New Zealand:
http://webweaversworld.blogspot.com/2007/03/womad-march-2007-taranaki-new-zealand.html"I've been to WOMAD once before - the first year it came to NZ and was held in Aotea Square in Auckland (not the ideal venue for WOMAD, but never mind) - and the performer who'd completely and unexpectedly blown me away was Shivkumar Sharma, the Indian santoor player. I was so pleased to see he was at WOMAD again this year, and Lou, Jason and I decided to go see him on the Brooklands Stage.
Shivkumar Sharma has been playing the Indian folk instrument, the santoor, for over 50 years, and his son Rahul Sharma is now a master santoor player too.
Their performance is accompanied by the most amazing tabla player Yogesh Samsi, and it's incredibly hypnotic - and absolutely compelling.The santoor's a shallow open wooden box, and has 100 metal strings stretched across it, somewhat like a zither or dulcimer. It's played using a pair of wooden rods, upturned at the ends. Shivkumar and Rahul play in the jugalbandhi style - where their two instruments compete and contrast with each other in an on-stage improvisation based on a classical raga. I love this description by Wellingtonista so much, I think I'll just borrow it:
Using a 100-string santoor in chromatic arrangement Sharma creates complex webs of beautiful, ethereal, shimmering sound, mounting improvisation within improvisation within the raga form, climaxing in furious blowouts with fiery tabla virtuosos and frenzied, ecstatic glissando.Shivkumar describes the effect of Santoor music as
"something like a whisper and a cascade of a waterfall." Which interestingly enough is almost exactly how Sarah described it, after seeing him perform the following day."
