Bengal Classical Music Festival back on course

When Bengal Foundation announced last month that they had to cancel the sixth edition of the Bengal Classical Music Festival due to the unavailability of the venue, Army Stadium, it broke the hearts of thousands of ardent music lovers in the country. However, in a new development on Tuesday, the organisers said they are planning to make the festival happen next month, at a new venue.

According to a press note by Bengal Foundation sent Tuesday night, they have secured Dhanmondi's Abahani ground as the new venue for the festival, which will take place from December 26-30 provided all government quarters clear the necessary permissions.

Organisers' preparations have already begun. “We have been doing the festival at Army Stadium for five years and that is a very familiar ground to us. This is a new ground and we just got the clearance, so we are still planning and checking various things regarding the organisation,” Farhadul Islam, CEO of the festival's event management company Blues Communications told The Daily Star. “We will have to secure the perimeter. To ensure that the festival's sound levels do not cause any problems to the residential area and hospitals, we will be using NoizCalc, a 'far field immission modelling software' tool with our sound system company d&b Audiotechnik.”

About the audience capacity of the festival, Farhadul Islam said “We are expecting the same kind of turnout like the previous years, and we can accommodate that number throughout the night.”

Bengal Foundation has also begun communicating with the artistes for the festival. “We began contacting the artistes the moment we got the venue, and the response from them has been very positive,” the foundation's DG Luva Nahid Choudhury told The Daily Star. “The artistes have a personal commitment to this festival; otherwise, this is a very busy time for them. It is too early to say if we can execute all our original plans for this year's festival, but we are trying,” she added.

In the past five years, the Bengal Classical Music Festival has established itself as the biggest festival of classical music in the world in terms of performance duration and audience: since 2014, the festival duration was increased a day to five nights – running from evening to dawn. The total number of attendances at the 2016 edition of the festival was nearly 200,000.

An illustrious lineup of artistes were confirmed to perform at the festival on its original scheduled date of November 23-27, including Pt. Jasraj, Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Asia's first Grammy winner Vidwan Vikku Vinayakram, a Western Classical Symphonic Orchestra (to perform with Pt. L Subramaniam), along with festival regulars Pt. Ajoy Chakravarty, Ustad Rashid Khan, Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pt. Ulhas Kashalkar, Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan and Kaushiki Chakravarty.

It was cancelled as the Army Sports Control Board (ASCB) denied allotment of the Army Stadium from November 20-28 to Bengal Foundation. The news of cancellation of the festival had caused uproar among music lovers, with cultural personalities lamenting the missed opportunity, and protests held in the capital and Mymensingh. In a way, the cancellation of the festival clearly brought out the extent of its popularity. Cultural Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Noor, however, had expressed optimism at the time while talking to The Daily Star, saying: “I am still optimistic that with the direct initiative of the Honourable Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the festival may be re-scheduled,” and turns out there was something to it.

If all goes according to plan, the Bengal Classical Music Festival will welcome their faithful audience at a new home in just over a month, and that may not be the worst thing to happen. One of the greatest signs of strength and resolve for any entity is in its ability to overcome obstacles; Bengal Foundation already did that once by holding the festival during a particularly tumultuous political and social time in 2013, and looks like they are on course to conquer something bigger this year.