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MADRAS MUSIC MELA 2001
SANGEETA KALANIDHI CONFERRED ON UMAYALPURAM SIVARAMAN
Shankar lauded the role of the Academy in preserving and nurturing classical art forms particularly Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. He hoped that the Academy would take care to further improve upon the quality of the acoustics so as to catch every note of the performing artistes. He said the rasikas sometimes found it difficult to catch the notes of vocalists when they leaned back while singing.
He conferred the titles of Sangeeta Kala Acharya on Kumbakonam M Rajappa Iyer, a noted percussionist, and vocalist Sulochana Pattabhiraman. He also presented the TTK Award of Excellence to vidwan V Tyagarajan and danseuse Nirmala Ramachandran. Mannargudi Sambasiva Bhagavatar received the Vaggeyakara award.
Academy president T T Vasu said in view of the platinum jubilee year of the Academy, a number of lecture-demonstrations were held at the conference. Former Under-Secretary General of the UN, C V Narasimhan, film producer M Saravanan and G S Mani were among those who felicitated the awardees. Academy vice-president M S Pattabhiraman convoked the Sadas. The speech by Umayalpuram Sivaraman was too brief for rasikas who were looking forward to hearing the great maestro speak.
After the award ceremony, Secretary Ramji read out the list of concert award winners, which were given away by the Chief-guest once again. The list of awardees includes T V Sankaranarayanan, Lalgudi Srimati Brahmanandam, Trichur Ramachandran, Maharajapuram Ramachandran, S Sowmya, Sanjay Subramanyam, Nithyasree Mahadevan, Raji Gopalakrishnan, Lakshmi Rangarajan, Malladi brothers, Master Balamuralikrishna, Vina Jayanthi, Delhi Sundararajan, V V S Murari, Akkarai Subhalakshmi, K V Prasad and others.
The Sadas was followed by a grand full-bench concert by Kunnakkudi Vaidyanathan and party.
