Raves for Ravi & Yehudi

In a decade of performing in the West, Indian Sitar Master Ravi Shankar, 47, has won a devoted following among musicians from Jazzman Dave Brubeck to Beatle George Harrison. But only one notable Westerner has ever performed with him: Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 51, longtime apostle of Indian culture and faithful practitioner of yoga. The two met in India in 1952, and Menuhin persuaded Shankar to play last summer at the Bath Festival in England. In what both performers termed "an experiment," Menuhin practiced his violin for two days under Shankar's coaching so that he could sit in on a raga. Clad in a raw-silk tunic and sitting cross-legged amid a haze of incense, Menuhin might indeed have passed for a native fidllist, except that he did not rest the head of his fiddle on his toe in the traditional Indian manner.

The experiment was such a success that Shankar and Menuhin decided to expand on it in a London recording studio. The result is one of the year's most fascinating--and briskly selling--classical albums; released in the U.S. on an Angel label, it has sold 15,000 copies in six weeks. Menuhin plays two ragas worked out by Shankar (the rest of the album is given over to a solo by Shankar and a performance of Enesco's Sonata No. 3 by Menuhin and his pianist sister Hephzibah). On the first, a violin solo, Menuhin spins out a contemplative opening cadenza, progresses to some pizzicato syncopations, then, over the pitty-pat of tabla (drums), skips and slides through a series of jaunty embellishments on the theme. On the second, he and Shankar engage in a long, rousing call-and-response pattern and a roller-coaster ensemble of rising and falling arpeggios, which leads, over steadily accelerating rhythms, to a climax of rhapsodic abandon.

Throughout the scored passages as well as the improvisations, Menuhin displays not only his accustomed technical brilliance but also an amazingly supple and knowing way with the complexities of the Indian musical idiom. The collaboration also makes a point that is often overlooked even by aficionados: for all his influence on Western jazz and pop, Shankar is an excellent classical musician.

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