Rama Sreerama

The child prodigy of Carnatic music who has taken the mandolin — an instrument unknown in India — to unique classical heights. A recording of an exquisite candlelit live performance at Real World Studios.

U. Srinivas is to Indian classical music what Yehudi Menuhin is to Western classical music. Like Menuhin, U. Srinivas was a child prodigy. He started to play the mandolin, a little-known instrument in India, when he was only six years old. At the time, the mandolin was an alien instrument in South Indian classical music, but Srinivas learned to play Carnatic ragas on the mandolin with so much ease and dexterity that his name was synonymous in India with the mandolin and he became popularly known as ‘Mandolin Srinivas’.

Even Europeans are surprised that such magical music can originate from an instrument which is normally a rather inconspicuous member of a Western orchestra. Like fellow Indian musician Shiv Kumar with the santoor, Srinivas has revived and raised an unknown instrument and given it a respectable status in classical music.

It was in August 1992, while on tour with Womad, that Srinivas recorded this album of traditional music during the second Real World Recording Week in a candlelit studio. U Srinivas passed away in September 2014.