The Bangla music festival returns to London later this month in what is the largest professional event outside the Indian subcontinent blending eastern music with western poetry.
It opens at Keats House in Hampstead next Saturday (Sept 24) with music by Tagore and his contemporaries who were influenced by the poet Keats.
The second night, Sunday, the musicians are in east London, at the heart of Britain’s biggest Bengali community, performing at Bethnal Green’s Rich Mix arts centre in Bethnal Green Road, near Shoreditch.
The Bangla festival stays in the East End for three dates in Spitalfields next month, at The Townhouse in Fournier Street on October 14, Water Poet pub in Folgate Street on October 15 and Brady Arts centre in Hanbury Street on October 29, all at 6pm.
The festival ends with two dates the following month, at Wimbledon Library in south-west London on November 5 and back in the East End at Brick Lane’s Kobi Nazrul centre in Hanbury Street on November 20.
The festival is organised by Saudha , the Society of Poetry and Indian Mmusic, which campaigns to create new audiences for Indian classical music, blending poetry, Western classical, Kathak and Gamelan as “profound arts to interpret the mood of music”.
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