Dhruba Ghosh

He is one of the most lyrical instrumentalists of India.

Just the four playing strings and twenty sympathetic strings of the sarangi veritably sing in all their sonorous splendour in the hands of Dhruba Ghosh, a leading master of this powerful instrument.

The impassioned bowing and the sharp cutting edge of his rhythmic shifts build up a captivating tension, with delicate embroidery of fine lines or bold colours on fine silk, or the virtuosic series of flights across octaves, like formations of cranes surging against a vast blue sky.

The sarangi was popularly known as the ‘instrument of a hundred colours’. In the hands of Dhruba Ghosh it is much more. The traditional classical sarangi recital has dynamically bloomed with the reflections and innovations that he has put into the matrix of a concert, whilst he has remained centered in its essential characteristic nature.

At times he just spirals into a great flourish or a song, as it were, from within the fabric of a sarangi recital and keeps the listener spellbound in timelessness.

That is the mystique of Dhruba Ghosh’s musicianship.

Dhruba Ghosh is an inheritor of the tradition of his masters, his father the late Pandit Nikhil Ghosh, famed percussionist-thinker, the late Ustad Sagiruddin Khan, sarangi maestro of the legendary Ustad Bundu Khan style of Delhi, Pandit Dinkar Kaikini, veteran vocalist-composer and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the world-renowned sarod maestro. Dhruba Ghosh is the nephew of the legendary flautist the late Pandit Pannalal Ghosh.

Dhruba Ghosh’s solo performances have been acclaimed in different parts of India and also art music societies and international music festivals in Europe e.g. Bratislava International Music Festival, Helsinki International Music Festival, Flanders International Music Festival, Baroque Music Festival - Brussels, Silk Route Festival at Athens, Rudolstadt Music & Dance Festival, Germany. His collaboration concerts with Baroque music, European classical music, Contemporary Music, traditional music of Greece, Iran, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Korea and Uzbekistan are known for the intense focus on melody and lyricism. His concepts and performances in the domain of World Music in Germany, UK, Norway and Japan are a significant shift from the usual.

Dhruba Ghosh has been at the core of the formation of a World String Orchestra in Japan involving the traditional bowed instruments of Japan, China, Korea, Uzbekistan and India.

Dhruba has shared the Grammy Award for 2010 in New Age Music Category with the CD “MIHO JOURNEY TO THE MOUNTAIN” with Paul Winter Consort.

He has also accompanied some of the finest vocalists of north India and the Indian sub-continent.