Local singers celebrate 50 years of SP

Staff Reporter – 

A group of Auckland singers will pay tribute to one of the most popular playback singers of Indian cinema Dr Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam (better known as ‘SPB’) at a concert later this month.

The tribute will be a part of a musical programme titled, ‘Geethanjali,’ organised by the ‘SB Music Magic Group’ on Saturday, February 20, 2016 from 6 pm at Mount Roskill Intermediate School Hall located at Denbigh Avenue.

The programme will also witness the singing prowess of Ravi Muthumanickam, Raju Sundaresan, Vishnu Priya Mallela.

Other performers include Amritha Sreenivasan, Archana Ravi, Balu Mallela, Chaitanya Mantravadi, Dheeraj Venkatachalam, Madhan Kalyan, N P Srinivasa Rao, Pooja Nory, Pratyusha Vikrant, Roma Nory, Sreesutha Nampally, Seetha Manognya, Sravani Kunapuli, Sudhiksha Ravooru, Suhas Shanbhogue and Thulasi Kandakumaran.

Karaoke Style

“The New Zealand Telugu Association is supporting the Karaoke style programme, while a section will be reserved for the performance of Violin and Key Board Sisters Divya and Geerthana Nanthakumar. ‘Geethanjali,’ is the 11^th in an annual series, established in 2005 to encourage local singers to present a compendium of old and new hits from Telugu films,” he said.

Indian Newslink has been promoting Geethanjali since its inception.

Record-breaker

SP is an artiste par excellence, and with more than 45,000 songs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, he has a place of pre-eminence in the Guinness Book of Records.

Rare achievements do not end there. He recorded 21 songs in Kannada in 12 hours on a single day (February 8, 1981) for composer Upendra Kumar; later, he recorded 19 songs in Tamil and 16 songs in Hindi, both in a day on separate occasions.

More, he has a place of permanence in the hearts of millions of men and women across the globe, with the credit for having moved them to rock in rhapsody or cry in sympathy or sorrow. Such is the power of his voice that he evokes emotions of humankind in tune with the vicissitudes.

Musical Group

One of the little known facts is that ‘Balu,’ as he is affectionately called in the industry, was the leader of a light music group in the late 1960s, in which Ilayaraja, who was to become a musical legend later, his older and younger brothers Bhaksar and Gangai Amaran were instrumentalists.

His only performance in New Zealand along with other artistes from India, held at the Logan Campbell Centre in Auckland on February 23, 2008, was witnessed among others by Helen Clark, who was the Prime Minister of New Zealand at that time.