| Main Performers | High Commissioner of India,
Vanessa Redgrave,
Mirabehn,
Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson,
HRH The Prince of Wales,
Earl Mountbatten of Burma - speakers
Yehudi Menuhin - violin,
Ravi Shankar - sitar,
Alla Rakha - tabla |
| Orchestra or Band | City of Birmingham Orchestra |
| Set List | 'British National Anthem',
'Indian National Anthems',
'Tagore Hymn' (India House Choir),
Overture - 'Egmont', Beethoven (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra),
'Violin Concerto in D', Beethoven (Yehudi Menuhin, Gandhi Centenary Celebrations),
'Ramdhun' (India House Choir),
'Canticle To Brother Sun', St.Francis of Assisi (Vanessa Redgrave, Ravi Shankar, Yehudi Menuhin, Alla Rakha)
Speech (HRH The Prince of Wales) |
| Royal Presence | HRH Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales |
| Performance Notes | Ravi Shankar's debut Royal Albert Hall performance.
"The Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister, practically every ambassador in London and a posse of prominent politicians were crammed beneath the inverted bowl of the Albert Hall, which was a gaudy herbaceous border of saris and dinner jackets, sprinkled with vivid splashes of turbans and diamonds.
Gandhi himself, who spent most of his life struggling against, boycotting, fasting against, not cooperating with, and being imprisoned by the British, would have been amazed at the assembly.
On his final visit to London in 1931 he tried to hire the Albert Hall for a meeting but was told that it would embarass the government. And Winston Churchill, in a Himalayan miscalculation, described him as 'a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up on the steps of the vice-Regal palace'.
Last night, 40 years on, his memory was hailed with unanimous hyperboles of devotion, admiration, and love by the British. Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma said that Gandhi must have seemed a funny little figure to some people. 'But within the small framework of his body there was a heart so large as to encompass all the poor and the suffering; a heart ready to forgive and to find excuses for those people who were his enemies.
Yehudi Menuhin with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by the young Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, produced rippling cascades of Beethoven. A mass Indian choir sang cheerful hymns with a tinkle of bells running through them.
Ravi Shankar played a hectic duet for sitar and violin with Menuhin. But through the evening of emotion and music and memories, the optomistic underlying theme was Gandhi's ridiculous but triumphant paradox of power through non-violence, which has been running around the world since he first started to formulate it at the beginning of the century."
(The Times, 22 October 1969, page 1)
The concert was broadcast by ITA Television from 23:30-00:20.
Lt. Andrew de Lukacs-Lessner was in attendance. |
| Related Archival Material | Programme (RAHE/1/1969/150) |