KAVITA
Chennai Times: What's HOT
January 8, 2010
What's Hot talks to western classical singer Kavita Baliga, who is currently a faculty member at A.R. Rahman’s music conservatory
M SUGANTH
Times News Network
Click HERE for interview
Swarovski premiere of Passage
Venice, Italy
A NIGHT OF PASSAGE. VENICE
ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINEE SHEKHAR KAPUR, NADJA SWAROVSKI, AR RAHMAN, HALEY BENNETT CELEBRATE KAPUR’S FIRST SHORT FILM ‘PASSAGE’ IN VENICE.
VENICE, Italy Monday 7th September 2009: Last night on the island of La Giudecca, Academy Award® nominated director Shekhar Kapur (ELIZABETH) and Swarovski Entertainment celebrated the international screening of PASSAGE, the first short film to be directed by Kapur. The charming I Granai della Repubblica were transformed into a magical space that played host to a soiree of glamorous stars.
Shekhar Hapur, AR Rahman, Haley Bennett and Nadja Swarovski were among the celebrities enjoying Venetian cocktails and canapés. Guests immerged into the world of PASSAGE for a private screening of PASSAGE as well as a live orchestral performance from India’s Kavita Baliga who sang music from the film scored by Academy Award Winner® AR Rahman.
http://www.brand.swarovski.com/Content.Node/ourinitiatives/stagescreen/movies/passage/passageinvenice.de.html#/en/ourinitiatives/stagescreen/movies/passageweeblylink_new_window
From the Mumbai Mirror
[The film's] music opera is composed by A R Rahman and is also sung by an Indian. “Rahman has composed a classic opera song for the film that he has recorded in India in an Indian female singer’s voice from his music institute in Chennai. When I played the song in Argentina, they said, ‘My God, what a great opera and an operatic voice!’ Their jaws fell open when I said both were Indian,” Shekhar recollected with a chuckle."
from the Mint Lounge Journal
Kavita Baliga
Voice
‘I’d done a concert with the guitarist Prasanna...and later I found out he’d submitted my name for a faculty position’
Some of the teachers at KM Music went through many months of applications and correspondence before they landed their positions. Kavita Baliga did it in 10 days.“At some point, I’d done a concert with the guitarist Prasanna, which was so much fun, and later I found out he’d submitted my name to K. Selvakumar for a faculty position,” she says. “It happened so fast that, within a week-and-a-half, I was here.”
Baliga, at the time, was a newly-minted graduate of the Boston Conservatory, where she got her MA in vocal performance. Being the only imported teacher of Indian origin, Baliga admits that the Rahman name was a big draw. “I grew up listening to him,” she says. “His music was always such a big part of the Indian community in the US.”Only when she arrived at KM Music did she realize the scale of the task. “Some of the students hadn’t heard any sort of Western classical music at all before, and many of them found it difficult to depart from the Indian techniques they’d learnt.” Baliga then plunged into an intensive four-day-per-week schedule, teaching big classes but also conducting the choir and giving one-on-one voice lessons.
Baliga revels in the freedom she’s been given to frame her own syllabus. “I thought I’d start, in the first year, with some early Baroque English music before moving on to Italian or French, because it’s easier to start with a language you already know,” she says. “Right now, though, it’s still basic exercises and notation and approaches to practice. They need to learn that first.”
Shekhar Kapur on A.R. Rahman
"Recently Rahman did the score for my short film that I did for Swarovsky, called Passage. The one I shot in Argentina. One of the pieces in it is a beautiful song and an aria in French. I ask people to guess where it is from, and they search for all the great composers of the western classical form. And are stunned when I tell them the piece was composed by A R Rahman, sung by an Indian girl from his Music Academy, and produced in his studio in Chennai."
from India Today
"If making music is his primary talent ,his ability to spot talent is not far behind. Whether it is in choosing faculty for his school or the singers for his sound tracks,Rehman has an unerring eye..........
...................................or Kavita Baliga who teaches Western vocals at the conservatory and found her way into Guzarish in Ghajini."
from The Hindu
SHARING THEIR KNOWLEDGE (From left) Violinist Shasta Ellenbogen, percussionist Michael Lindsay and vocalist Kavita Baliga
Where East and West Meet
ARTS With seasoned international faculty, the KM Conservatory opens a new chapter in the teaching of western classical music.
...Born and raised in the U.S., Kavita Baliga is a western classical vocal teacher. She has established her `voice' in multiple genres of music. She already has a captive audience and a huge fan following. She expounds the western classical mode in her choir, sight-singing and voice culture classes. Kavita has played roles such as Juliette from "Romeo et Juliette" by Gounod and Zerlina in "Don Giovanni" by Mozart.
from Real Bollywood News
Rahman has just composed his first ever song for an international opera-on-film that’s directed by Shekhar Kapoor. “I thank Shekhar for trusting me with something so unusual. The singer Kavita Baliga is a teacher at my music school. Though she’s Indian she comes from LA. It’s a great team that we have at music school."
from At a Glance Magazine
by Global Adjustments
Photos by T. Selvakumar
