How two brothers founded the first Australian Indian Orchestra

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE


Last year, Sydney brothers Sagar and Suraj Nagaraj were involved in a string orchestra. On their concert program were works by Tchaikovsky and Mahler — as well as Suraj’s orchestral arrangements of music from Bollywood films.

Their audience loved it. As Sagar tells us, “we knew we were onto something”.

Now, these artists have launched “Australia’s first and only symphony orchestra dedicated to performing Indian music”. Their inaugural performance will feature 60 musicians, spanning instruments from sitar to tabla, keyboard to voice. And they’ll play Bollywood songs that their conductor and artistic director Suraj has single-handedly arranged for them.

To the Australian Indian Orchestra, Suraj brings his experience as concertmaster of the Sydney Youth Orchestra; Sagar has performed with the Australian World Orchestra.

In this interview, we chat with AIO general manager, violinist, and co-founder Sagar about their first concert Sydney to Mumbai: A Symphonic Journey to Incredible India.

Sagar, it’s great to chat about AIO’s inaugural performance! So how did it all get started?

It was after our Rosemont Chamber Orchestra concert’s performance in November 2022. That was a string orchestra concert that had a program of classical music like Tchaikovsky’s String Serenade and Mahler’s Adagietto with my brother Suraj [who] had arranged a medley of Bollywood film music for the concert. And it was so well received, both by Indian and non-Indian audience members, that we knew we were onto something.

A few months later in a Mosman pub with our friend Panagiotis Karamanos, we discussed the possibility of doing a concert purely with famous Bollywood hits with full symphony orchestra, and he loved the idea so we were away!

As there hasn’t been an orchestra like yours in Australia, what are you most excited to share with your audience?

I’m very excited to see Bollywood music being performed at the scale of a full symphony orchestra. Like its Western counterpart, Bollywood music also has a symphony orchestra bringing its catchy, stirring songs to life! Particularly the strings are used a lot to convey romance and tragedy in Bollywood films.

For audiences who have not seen Bollywood films, they are basically all musical-movies — think High School Musical — so the music is just as if not more important than the action and dialogue of the movie itself.

I think audiences are in for an absolute treat to hear the music of these films being performed live.

So how will your 60-piece symphony orchestra be utilised to bring out the unique qualities of the Bollywood songs you’ll be playing?

With a full orchestra, you have a wide range of sound at your disposal. You can capture the emotion and drama of Bollywood with the brass, strings, winds, and percussion. This is simply not possible with any other form of musical band. The scale is just not big enough for what Bollywood demands.

The unique part is the combination of Indian instruments like the sitar and tabla, which come from a very different world of music that does not use the foundations of Western music like its notation or rhythms. This is the exciting part of putting together musical traditions from East and West.

How did you find and build such a huge orchestra from scratch, anyway?!

We can’t give away trade secrets! Just kidding — being musicians ourselves, many of these players are our friends and colleagues from orchestras in Sydney like the Opera Australia Orchestra, Sydney Conservatorium of Music orchestra, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra, and the Australian World Orchestra. The Indian musicians come from Bollywood bands that my brother and I perform in.

Without these connections, it would be impossible to put together a pilot project like this.

How have you created that “sound” you’re after with your orchestra?

Having used Indian techniques and rhythms in our previous concert in November as the Rosemont Chamber Orchestra, we found that musicians were able to adapt quite well to these Indian musical requirements.

My brother Suraj has found a way to arrange the music so that it is playable on Western instruments.

How did you choose the songs you wanted to feature in your inaugural event, and why are they meaningful to you? So meaningful in fact that your brother Suraj worked to arrange the full program of songs for every instrument in the orchestra!

That’s a great question, as not every Bollywood song is natural for orchestra. We chose songs that had major orchestral interludes, or significant parts that featured orchestra.

We also chose some of these songs as they mean a lot to both of us because we grew up listening to them! It’s a labour of love to bring them to the big stage with this amazing orchestra.

In a statement, you said this would be a “landmark event for the cultural fabric of music here in Australia”. How do you ultimately see AIO changing, enriching, or helping shape this cultural fabric?

The AIO can play a significant role in shaping the future of Australia’s musical landscape as we see the next generation stepping into the limelight and taking centre stage.

Bollywood music in concert has the capacity to bring a whole new type of audience, creating hundreds of first-time concertgoers and cross-cultural communication, which can inspire and create a whole new generation of music-lovers.

The AIO could also be the catalyst for more groundbreaking crossover collaborations of styles and cultures in the future, making the fusion music concert style a more frequent mainstay in Australian concert halls.

Namaste, and see you in the concert!

Be among the first to hear the Australian Indian Orchestra in Sydney to Mumbai: Bollywood Meets Symphony Orchestra from 5pm August 13 in Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Images supplied.