Bisengaliev’s Symphony

A man from Kazakhstan is determined to mould India’s fully professional symphony orchestra into a globally acclaimed phenomenon

Music leaked out of St James’ Church in London on to Piccadilly. Walking down Jermyn Street, Khushroo Suntook, then vice-chairman of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, heard it, stopped and took a detour. That summer evening in London, Marat Bisengaliev was on violin, playing with a small orchestra. After the performance, Suntook invited Bisengaliev and the orchestra to Mumbai.

The Kazakhstan National Orchestra visited India a few months later in 2003, and then twice in 2004. In between, Suntook and Bisengaliev shared several cups of tea and talked about their next project. It was in one of these sessions that the idea emerged. “I don’t know who came up with it, but it was very ambitious,” said Bisengaliev, “We thought we’d create an Indian orchestra.”

In 2006, the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) held its first performance at the NCPA. The country’s first fully professional symphony orchestra, it offers concerts of an international standard over two seasons—February and September each year. Bisengaliev is musical director and Suntook the chairman of the NCPA.

“It might be my karma,” says Bisengaliev. “I landed up in England, married an English girl who played in the orchestra and she gave me the opportunity to develop my solo career. We divorced, but lived together for about seven years and had a daughter who’s 18 now.”

Bisengaliev started speaking English only when he moved to England 20 years ago. And then, for about three years, all he did was practise, prepare for concerts and answer telephone calls at home. The first major master class he took was at Leeds. It was also the first master class where he didn’t have a translator. “A girl was struggling with her vibrato and I didn’t know how to say it in English. I thought and said, ‘Your vibrator is too slow. It has only two speeds.’ I couldn’t understand why the whole audience started to laugh,” he says, deadpan.

In his first year in England, he gave a performance of the Sibelius concerto where an agent from Naxos spotted him and offered a record deal right after the concert. “It was like a Hollywood happy ending. But it was only the beginning for me. The contract opened many doors for me, and since then, I have played with many beautiful orchestras across the world and recorded with other companies too—Sony, Marco Polo, EMI.” Recordings, he feels, are what got him recognition, especially in India. “When I came here the first time, I was very surprised to find some people owned the entire collection, more than what I have at home. Naxos is very popular here.”

But, Bisengaliev can’t listen to his past recordings now—his music making has changed. “I guess that’s natural evolution,” he says. “I come from the Russian tradition but I picked up a lot of things in the West. The way I play Bach, for example, is not the Soviet way—heroic, strong, definitive, straightforward—all words you can use to describe the Soviet time.”

Bisengaliev started distancing himself from traditional ways of playing, trying to understand each composer and play in a way he would approve of.  “With Bach, I’ve managed to make the orchestra sound authentic. In his time, they used a different kind of violin with gut strings and a special bow with which you couldn’t play detache (a method of stopping the bow on the strings to separate notes). We try to recreate the same sounds with the modern bows—non-vibrato, different phrasing and articulation that has a broad sound. His music was light, played for the elite while they were at lunch,” explains Bisengaliev. 

“For a truly outstanding performance, you have to love the composer and pass that on to the listener. There was a period when I was preparing for a Bach competition (the 1988 Leipzig International Bach Competition, which he won) during which I was eating, living, drinking Bach—my room was full of his posters. It reminds me a little bit of my nephew who thinks he will be playing Beethoven all his life.”
Marat gave lesser composers the same dedication. Like Wieniewsky, whose anthology is small, but beautiful and incredibly virtuosic with a notorious reputation among violinists of being unplayable.

Yet, there was a creeping dissatisfaction. “I found music is going absolutely nowhere in the West… there’s no time for the finer details. With an international orchestra the number of rehearsals is limited. You can get two at the most, usually one that lasts about 40 minutes. And when you come to the end of a rehearsal, with 30 seconds left, they start looking at their watches. If you go overtime, they either get up and leave, even if there are a few bars left, or threaten you with the Trade Union.”

In Mumbai, Bisengaliev has the freedom to spend as much as time as he wants with the SOI. “It’s not as professional as the LSO (London Symphony Orchestra), but you can get better results. The musicians are working hard and can now play Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Strauss and Stravinsky, something I didn’t think would be possible in a couple of years,” he says.

The competition to get into the SOI is very tough. This time it includes 17 Indians, the largest number yet.  “In India, musicians start late—15, 18, even 21. Imagine a tennis professional who starts at 21. You have to start at the age of three or four,” he explains.

“If India wants to be perceived as one of the civilised big powers, they have to have other attributes of a big, global economy—an opera house, a symphony orchestra, a ballet troupe, schools for classical music and dance. We have to find ways to make it possible. We have to get somewhere first. It’s a chicken and egg situation. I don’t know which I have chosen.”

Since June 2008, the NCPA in partnership with schools across Mumbai started the Suzuki Method of training children. There are 200 students studying under the method now. “By next year, I hope there are 1,000 and in the following year, thousands more,” says Bisengaliev.

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