All posts tagged: Chauhan

National Youth Orchestra/ Chauhan: Collide review – surging energy and remarkable intensity | Classical music

National Youth Orchestra/ Chauhan: Collide review – surging energy and remarkable intensity | Classical music

There’s always more at an NYO concert. More players: 160 this time, crammed on to a platform that seems full with half that number. More of the energy that comes with the fact that, for every player, this is a very special occasion. And, in recent seasons, more stuff to remind us that these are teenagers, not hard-bitten professionals. This time there was a semi-choreographed walk-on to a mashup of Raye and Chaka Khan, with the percussion taking the lead and the assembled orchestra eventually joining in. There was a short speech from one of the players before each work – somewhere between pointing out a personal connection with the music and giving superfluous justification for its inclusion. And as an encore – sung, not played – there was Jacob Collier’s Something Heavy, with a bit more choreography. Safe to say the other orchestras conducted by Alpesh Chauhan, the NYO’s new principal conductor, don’t ask all this of their players. But often the tautness and focus of the playing exceeded what he might expect from …

Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan review – a tender tale of love beyond borders | Fiction

Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan review – a tender tale of love beyond borders | Fiction

“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny. Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness. Tahliil is an asylum seeker from Somalia, who, together with his sister, Sumayya, joins their mother in Leicester. He works as an at-home carer and at a cash-and-carry for cash-in-hand while he waits for the …