Join us for our Livestream Series featuring Aditya Prakash and Arun Ramamurthi. We are grateful to The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts for their support to make these programs available for free but donations are welcome to support the artists directly.
Watch live at www.facebook.com/districtofraga
Carnatic Duo - Voice and Violin
Aditya Prakash and Arun Ramamurthi explore the unexpected ways ragas move the conversation between the voice and the violin. Using manodharma (improvisation with intent) as the foundation, they seek to find new ways of tapping into the unbound creativity that this art form offers.
Aditya Prakash, an award-winning vocalist known for his powerful and emotive voice, is a young virtuoso of Carnatic music, and one of the youngest musicians to tour and perform with Ravi Shankar at the age of 16. Aditya has trained intensively in Carnatic music under esteemed masters in India and now is under the mentorship of Sri RK Shriramkumar and Sri TM Krishna. He has garnered acclaim for his Carnatic performances in India and the USA and also for his cross-collaborative projects worldwide. Aditya has worked with leading innovators of the arts such as Anoushka Shankar, Karsh Kale, Tigran Hamasyan and Akram Khan. In 2010, Aditya founded the Aditya Prakash Ensemble, a group that frames Aditya’s highly ornamented, stylized and emotive Carnatic vocal style around jazz instrumentation.
Arun Ramamurthi is a disciple of the renowned violinist, Delhi Shri P Sunder Rajan. He is also a trained vocalist having learned from Smt. Padma Kutty and also from the late Vairamangalam Lakshminarayanan. Arun has accompanied reputed Carnatic vocal artists at various venues in the US and in India. In addition to performing, he enjoys giving back to his community and to the next generation of young musicians. For the past 11 years, he has been teaching violin to several enthusiastic kids. In 2015 he inaugurated MaargaUSA, a non-profit organization that provides a platform for young budding musicians in the Los Angeles area to showcase their talent. He also serves as a board member for the South Indian Music Academy in Los Angeles.