Yanni lives up to his billing at the Taj concert

Suparn Verma in Agra

It took a train to stop Yanni, and not for very long either. And while the lights on the Taj ran the spectrum from sunrise hues to cyanotic blue, the composer gave his audience all they desired. And then some.

The band members began finding their seats at 7 pm. The dry Agra winds rustled through restless clothing while the crowd cried for Yanni.

After months of suspense over the issue of artificially lighting the Taj and non-stop work on the stage, Yanni's big moment was at hand. "He has been excited about the concert for so long," said the composer's mother, Felitsa Chyrssomallis.

As the chanting reached a crescendo, conductor Arman Anassion hurried onstage and bowed to the audience. The Taj, glowing in an early morning light, framed his rising arm as Pedro Eustache on the saxophone broke into the opening bars of Deliverance. Just as the orchestra gained momentum, Yanni ran up to the stage, his black hair flying in the wind. Clad in stark whites with embroidery up front, the composer sat at the keyboard and began playing, and the sound that emerged was that of the sitar.

Violinist Karen Briggs, who later said she liked the speed and intensity of Deliverance, ended the piece with an extended solo.

Keyboardist Ming Freeman finds the piece emotionally appealing, despite its length. "I think it specifically has a very Indian flavour to it," he said.

The piece ends and Yanni, who still hasn't spoken a word, moves to the piano as the light dulls to a midnight blue. The quavering first notes of Adagio in C minor, a slow, mellow melody enveloped the audience. And once it is over the music composer and philosopher spoke for the first time.

"Thank you very much," he said. "I am deeply moved to be performing at the Taj and I am honoured to be part of India's 50 years of Independence celebration..." A train thundered away in the distance, tooting urgently into the night. His eulogy interrupted, Yanni waited for it to pass. The day before, during the final rehearsal, he had been stopped by a radio playing Dhano, teri yaad aye.

The train passed by and Yanni could tell the audience how he had oft dreamed of performing in India. Then he introduced his new piece, Renegade, before going back to the keyboard.

A pink glow suffused the Taj, falling also across the stage and audience. Pedro Eustache and Karen Briggs kicked off the piece, Karen characteristically holding her violin in place with her chin.

Asked about the habit later, she laughed, "I have been doing it for the last 20 years. It leaves me free to dance."

Yanni brought in new band member Peruvian classical guitarist Ramon Steniare. Ramon opened the chords for another new piece, Waltz in 7/8. For the academically inclined, Anassion clarified there's no such thing as a waltz in 7/8, only a waltz in 3/4. Yanni being Greek, he may have included the metre for dance -- 7. "It is trying to merge the Johann Strauss waltz with the Greek folk dance... It is a western dance forced on a Greek metre," he said.

Facts settled, the New Age guru described how his father took him to the mountains and taught him about life, nature and simplicity. "You don't need a lot to be happy... The best things in life are accessible to everyone -- like truth, imagination, creativity, love, kindness, compassion. Greatness has nothing to do with money or possession," his father apparently told him. And then Yanni got down to playing Tribute, not in memory of his father, but "to celebrate the greatness inherent in all of us".

Now the set was bathed in blue and the Taj behind in brilliant white. The trumpets opened up, gave predence to the bass guitar and the keyboards before ending the piece, to deafening applause.

Then Yanni placed one hand on the keyboard, the other on the mixer, and threw back his head dramatically, before launching into Within Attraction, the most popular number from his Acropolis album. It included an entertaining jugalbandi between Joel Taylor on the drums and Danny Reyes on the percussion, which gave way to one by Karen and Annassian -- also on the violin – till the music from two violins finally mesh into one.

The next piece is an aria from Lakme, a French opera, played against the white fluorescent backdrop of the Taj.

A 15-minute interval followed, wherein many members of the audience candidly admitted to each other they were mystified by Yanni’s music, some even accepting they hadn’t heard the composer before. Armed with drinks and wafers, they returned to their seats. But they weren’t quite ready for what followed.

David Hudson, an aborigine – yep, the Australian variety – came up to play his native digeridoo. And as the primal music flooded over, the audience began clapping in time with the beat.

After Nightingale, Southern Exposure and I Am a Mountain, Yanni took a break to introduce the members of the band. Later they played Nostalgia and what Yanni said was one of his first pieces, Marching Season. "But I couldn’t play it at that time," he says. He was a child then.

He dedicated the mandatory song to Shah Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal and the architects of the Taj. The concert ended with the his signature tune, Santorini. Significantly, Santorini is an extinct volcano on an island of the same name off Greece that reportedly experienced one of the biggest cataclysms in history.

Yanni told the band afterwards that this concert at the Taj was his biggest triumph, even eclipsing what he did at the Acropolis. It was, he told them, four times better, adding that even his girlfriend Linda Evans had told him that.

Photographs: Atul Chowdhary