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3 pm and 9 pm East-West raga improvisations
Conway Hall £8 (£5 concessions) admits to whole festival

You are earnestly requested to bring food and drink to share

Lisa Sangita Moskow, sarod; Lawrence Ball, piano

Lawrence Ball and Lisa Sangita fuse their Western and Eastern classical roots into a fluid, lyrical and ecstatic expression. The music ebbs and flows between deeply reflective and highly animated moods, and between straightforward and intricately interwoven textures. These pieces begin from the raga format, but evolve according to the in-the-moment emotional pulse and interplay. Since the Oct.26th concert coincides with the huge anti-war rally in Washington D.C., we would like to dedicate it and the Oct.23rd one as well to the principle of working to create peace through non-violent cooperation. We would agree with one wise soul who has said that war is a failure of the imagination.

Both Lawrence and Lisa have been improvising and composing for over 30 years.

Lawrence has recorded almost 2000 pieces of distinctive piano explorations, the hallmark of his repertoire. He is also the director of the Planet Tree Music Festival in London which has presented new and exciting musical programs since 1996.

Lisa Sangita who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area specializes in playing her electric sarod (a one-of-a-kind adaptation of the traditional classical Indian sarod) in unusual contexts, but has found the greatest satisfaction in the combination of sarod with chordal instruments. She studied with maestro Ali Akbar Khan for more than 15 years. The timbres of sarod and piano are quite similar, but they differ widely in the way they express themselves (piano being a very harmonic instrument and sarod being more strictly melodic). Together they create a whole new musical language.