Of all the things that Beethoven is remembered for, his deep interest in Indian spiritualism is certainly not one that immediately springs to mind. Nevertheless, during his lifetime Beethoven reflected at length upon Indian philosophy and religion, and as he grew increasingly blind in his later years he was increasingly drawn to eastern spiritualism as an inspiration for his music. In his persona diaries, he frequently copied out verses from the ancient Brahmanical Upanishad poems, and commented on the works of Goethe, the renowned German orientalist.

Pianist Shani Diluka uses her music to highlight these hidden – yet very tangible – links between Beethoven and India. Born in Monaco to Sri Lankan parents, Diluka remains the only pianist from the Indian subcontinent to have attended the Paris National Superior Conservatory, and therefore this is a cross-cultural musical project close to Diluka’s heart. A technically gifted interpreter of German romantic repertoire, Diluka possesses a refreshing willingness to use her personal reflections upon historical and cultural issues as her creative springboard. 

Diluka performed Beethoven’s two best known piano sonatas: the ‘Pathetique’ No. 8 in C minor and ‘Moonlight’ Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp minor. Joined by Mehboob Nadeem on sitar and Mitel Purohit on tabla, this recital was fascinating in the way that it infused Hindustani Classical traditions into this canonical piano repertoire. Performed in St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square, London, the evening was an acoustic delight, with the resonance of the sitar and the delicate attack of the tabla filling the intimate marble-walled church. Diluka’s dynamic and emotional range was breathtaking.

This performance continued the work of violinist Yehudi Menuhin and sitarist Ravi Shankar, whose trilogy of ‘East Meets West’ albums beginning in the mid-1960s sought to find points of contact and mutual respect between two previously disparate musical traditions. Diluka similarly highlighted the profound musical universalities contained in both Western Classical composition and Hindustani Classical raga. The raga constructed to intro and outro each movement were intentionally mirrored Beethoven's tonalities and tempo markings. Furthermore, the underlying sonata form of Beethoven’s compositions powerfully mirrored the tripartite structures which comprise the Hindustani Classical forms. Beethoven’s melodic development and use of motifs also mirrored traditional sitar improvisational technique. Striking symmetries abound between these two rich traditions, and Diluka teased them out with great subtly.

Diluka provided a very insightful commentary during the interval, where she was keen to stress, above all else, that her performance was 'not a fusion, but a dialogue’. Rather than reproducing classical chamber music forms with bowed strings simply transplanted with Indian instrumentation, she strived instead for a sense of mutually respectful and reverent detachedness. The music oscillated in a lengthy question-and-answer fashion between the two styles and was guided by the structural contours of sonata form and raga. But raga and piano rarely overlapped. Only in the final presto agitato movement of the Moonlight sonata did all three musicians play simultaneously, making this climatic moment of cultural synthesis particularly powerful. With this restraint, Diluka achieved a form of cross-cultural musical dialogue that avoided gimmicky orientalism or crude cultural appropriation.  

The only boundary not pushed by Diluka during this performance was repertoire. For all their brilliance, a recital the of the Moonlight and the Pathetique leaves plenty of room for further explorations of Beethoven’s lesser performed sonatas. From the Germanic school, a similar approach to Brahms, Schumann, or even Bach would definitely be a rewarding endeavour. Thinking further afield, one has to wonder how powerful Chopin’s nocturnes, Debussy’s Preludes, or Lizst’s Etudes would sound with a similar ‘East Meets West’ reinterpretation.