The
Voice of the Century
Smt. P. Susheela is recognized as one of the
greatest stars the world of south indian cinema has ever known
and she has always had a high profile with a metrical stability
in all of her renderings. She was an artist who scaled the heights
and achieved a greatness that is only now coming to be fully appreciated.
Her repertoire spans extensive recordings in all the major south
Indian languages and are representative of the neglected audiography
that she revived in the mind of the listener, that sense of wonder
that was so central to the aesthetics of the various periods .
To the music of G Ramanathan, C R Subburaman,
S Rajeshwara Rao, Ghantasala, Pendyala and Susarla Dakshinamoorthy,
Smt. Susheela brings vocal qualities of both romantic beauty and
passionate fervour. Smt. Susheela was identified with the roles
of heroines, which she sang shyly introducing herself to the poetic
artistry of those early times.
On her colloboration with composers K V Mahadevan,
Viswanathan Ramamurthy, Devarajan and later M S Viswanathan, her
vocalize presents a well a rounded and totally convincing picture
of Kannadasan’s immortal libretto’s, has been singled out as one
of the finest gramophone achievements of all time. She performed
the Marudhakasi/Kannadasan/Valli’s repertoire to great effect
in the recording studio and on the celluloid.
Her hypnotic ambient and silkily beautiful voice
and the structure mirroring the character’s inner turmoil in V
Kumar/Shanker-Ganesh/Illaiyraaja compositions also proved an endless
stimulus and source of inspiration for them , who enjoyed exploiting
the descriptive possibilities of Smt. Susheela’s art making her
the only communicative recitalist of our times.
As well as comfortably encompassing the entire
mezzo soprano range, Smt. Susheela’s voice in its distinctive
lower and higher register was rich and powerful, enabling her
convincingly to perform music written for other sopranos for she
took great pains over their production and treated them as her
own, in order to ensure their success, and also to ensure that
the performances were faithful to the score. Her vocal lines is
always rich in coloratura passages, serve as true representations
of nature, but serve as metaphors to express the passions and
sufferings of human characters.
Smt. Susheela can create a sense of turbulence
which can break out directly in an aria or that determines the
constant state of agitation. She does that so well by means of
musical figurations which exploit every word in the literary text
and exalt its dramatic meaning or by means of chromaticism and
an almost unbroken line of semiquavers or add further pathos to
a song whose slow progress expresses the burden of real tragedy.
Smt. Susheela’s reputation nowadays rests firmly
on her renderings. In all her repertoire, both the composer and
the mezzo can be seen to share the same ideas in their creative
development, and their aims, the rediscovery of the true function
of music.
Her voice could be called as Rolls Royce and
in particular when she unleashes it at full throttle, a continued
high quality performance. But whenever she rendered a song, her
limpid phrases and sumptuous timbre melted hearts of stone for
sure.
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