PERHAPS the greatest strength of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is the esteem in which it is held worldwide.
This enables the programme to attract international artists of the very highest calibre.
This year that includes the celebrated sitar player and musician Anoushka Shankar.
Taught to play the great Indian classical instrument by her father, the legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar, Anoushka has risen to become one of the most acclaimed musical artists in the world today.
I catch up with Shankar as she prepares for her concert at Edinburgh’s beautiful Festival Theatre on the closing night of the festival, August 27. I suggest to her that her music – which draws, of course, on the classical Indian tradition, but encompasses many other musical forms from around the world – is part of a rich culture of creating musical hybrids.
It’s a culture that, intriguingly, includes the work that The Beatles, and George Harrison in particular, made with her father. “I love the word hybrid for this”, she says, “it’s one of the better ones.”
Shankar was raised, largely, in London and California. As she was growing up, her beloved parents, Ravi and Sukanya Rajan, ensured that Anoushka, “maintained an annual connection” with India.
Consequently, “through the music and the art, I have always felt very Indian”.
This experience gave her a “shared heritage”, what she calls, with a laugh, “my mixed life”. This diverse background makes it, “very natural and organic”, she says, that her music should combine the great traditions of Indian music with other influences from her considerable artistic hinterland.
This internationalism is now a celebrated aspect of Anoushka Shankar’s work. However, I wonder if, earlier in her career, it was difficult to find her own musical path due to the huge expectation that, as the daughter of her illustrious father, she would become the custodian of the Indian classical tradition.
Because her father is “so synonymous with India, and with Indian music and culture”, some people have considered her as a “sub-representative” of the Indian classical music tradition, Shankar acknowledges. That is something she has experienced as a double-edged sword.
“It’s an honour to represent that music and culture”, she says. However, she adds, “there was a lot of pressure and it was very frightening. It just felt like a really huge task to live up to.”
Over time she realised that, although she “couldn’t live up to external ideas and expectations”, she “could always live up to my own truth. If there is truthful integrity in my work, I can feel proud of it.”
That truth reflects Shankar’s life as a member of the Indian diaspora. “What comes out of me is music that seeks to represent how I see the world and how I live in the world”, she observes.
“It also represents a dialogue between cultures that I feel is very important to continue. In so much of the world we see borders closing or people’s hearts shutting against each other.”
There is, the musician believes, a “beauty and richness that comes from listening to each other and growing together. When you explore the space between cultures artistically, what’s fascinating is that you can find commonalities, but you can also find, and dig into, the differences.”
When such musical hybrids succeed, Shankar says, “you can hear all the bits sitting differently and beautifully together. It’s like in a food creation, when a surprising flavour has been added. It wakes you up a little, it’s exciting.”
She hopes her 2011 album Traveller, which combines her Indian musical heritage with the rich flamenco music tradition of Andalusia, is an example of this. “Sometimes my instrument was the one completely travelling into the flamenco space”, she remembers.
At other times the sounds of flamenco came to the fore, and, at yet others, “we were finding a space in the middle.”
Shankar perceives an increasing “opening up” among audiences around the world to music from other cultures. “My experience is that something has really been changing in the last decade or so”, she comments.
Before that, she suggests, her father, the great Indian tabla player, composer and percussionist Zakir Hussain and herself were “kind of the outliers”, in having a truly international audience. “Whenever we would play around the world, our audiences would have this mix of the South Asian community and the local community”, Shankar remembers.
These days, by positive contrast, she thinks it is no longer exceptional for musical artists to have truly international, cross-cultural audiences.
In her Edinburgh concert, Shankar promises a diverse set. It will include, she says, work from her forthcoming mini-album, titled Chapter 1: Forever, For Now, which has been produced by the acclaimed Pakistani-American singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab.
“The music really has a unique sound for me”, she says of the new work. “It feels, somehow, a little more intimate, but also more expansive and spacious.”
Shankar is delighted to be returning to play at the EIF, a festival that has been a happy hunting ground for both her father and herself over the years. “It’s hugely exciting to come there”, she enthuses.
“It’s one of the most unique festivals in the world. It’s one of the festivals you hear about, even if you’re nowhere near there.
“Everyone knows when the Edinburgh Festival’s on, there’s so much buzz about it. It’s exciting to step into a place that feels excited about art.
“That’s sounds so basic, but it’s also quite rare to be somewhere where the whole atmosphere is full of art forms.”
Shankar is full of praise for the first programme of Nicola Benedetti’s tenure as director of the EIF. “Looking at the line-up, it’s just such a wonderful, broad range of artists and cultures being represented”, she says.
Shankar has, she remembers, “had really lovely experiences” on the two previous occasions when she has played in Edinburgh. The EIF audience is, she says, “very warm and keen”.
Anoushka Shankar plays the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on August 27: eif.co.uk
