KARACHI: The very word romance evokes soft images and invokes mellifluous melodies that make you go wonky in the knees. This was the kind of expectation that one went to see and hear a performance called Phool khiltey hain in maheenon mein on Wednesday evening which was part of the National Academy of Performing Arts’ (Napa) International Performing Arts Festival that is under way until March 22. Unfortunately, despite the involvement in the show of someone as revered in the world of music as Arshad Mahmud and a couple of noteworthy performances, one left the academy’s auditorium with nothing to write home about.

Mahmud in his introductory remarks to the concert said the reason for arranging the show was that they had felt that romance was getting diminished from our lives. Therefore romantic poems were chosen for the programme in the manner in which Hazrat Amir Khusrau developed a relationship between music and poetry. The poets whose kalaam was selected were Miraji, Nasir Kazmi, Ibn-i-Insha, Kaifi Azmi, Parveen Shakir and Shehzad, while compositions were made by Nigel Bobby, Arsalan and Wajahat.

All of this sounded good, and to be fair to the young musicians and singers, it is no mean feat to set Urdu and Punjabi poetry to music, and then do justice to its vocal interpretation. But one is assuming that there’s a formidable team of seniors that had things to oversee. At least the pitching in some of the songs could have been checked. It takes a great deal of riyaz to hold a note that’s meant to complete a couplet.

The gig began with a rendition of Parveen Shakir’s poem ‘Bus itna yaad hai’. It was a nice little composition. One thought that things would pick up from there. But composition-wise and in terms of singing, what followed was at best reasonable. Nigel Bobby was the only singer who impressed with his pitching, and even he needed to be told that when the word ‘lehr’ (wave) is uttered as ‘leher’ it adds a syllable to the metre of the line used in a poem. The reference here is to Nasir Kazmi’s ‘Dukh ki lehr ne chheda ho ga’. Still, Bobby’s singing of another Nasir Kazmi ghazal ‘Yaad aata hai roz-o-shab koi’ was a much better and melodious piece.

The song ‘Kitni duur ho’ highlighted the fact that more concentration was given to presenting not-so-easy compositions rather than coming up with light-hearted and feel-good, romantic tunes. Ibn-i-Insha’s ‘Kabhi un ke milan ki aasha ne’, for example, too, could have been presented keeping contemporary musical trends in mind. Again, the fact that young musicians had tried their hand at a certain kind of pure literature is enough to pat their backs for, and hope for better things to come.

For this writer, though, the standout performers on Wednesday evening were the percussionists.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2020