“It is not just for T20 and Bollywood that Mumbaikars make long queues. They do so for music too. Especially if it is a concert by aapro [one of our own] Zubin Mehta,” writes Agniva Banerjee in Monday’s (8/12) Times of India (New Delhi). “The world-famous conductor will lead the centuries-old Bavarian State Orchestra on September 9 and 10 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), with such staples of Western classical music as Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Brahms’s fourth symphony and Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. For the two-day concert, the NCPA’s ticket counter was to open at 9am on Saturday. But aficionados had started making the rounds of the gate opposite it the previous evening. By midnight, about 50 people had gathered. By 6am, the queue was more than 200-people long. They were young and old, but mostly middle-aged, and had come from all over the city. Foreigners and expatriates could be seen too. There was an old gentleman with a rather distinguished air about him. He had come with Readers Digest and an umbrella.… There was an old lady telling her teenage grandchildren about the mellifluousness of Schubert’s melodies.… A college girl was wondering if she would be lucky enough to get a Rs1,000 ticket—the cheapest.”
Posted August 12, 2013
