Hi Smlaksh. Glad to oblige with some details. I was going to post this message earlier anyway.
Two observations. First, I was recently scouring through the web and chanced upon a comment by someone who described herself as "a mother". Presumably the mother of one of the contestants. She was complaining that the judges were not impartial in judging their singing peers. A valid concern though I don't think it is borne out by fact. There is a lot of political correctness involved when the judges issue comments on their peers' singing and an aversion to awarding anything but average marks when the singing is not stellar. But I don't think the judges have awarded higher than deserved marks to their peers. The lady complained, for instance, that Srilekha Parthasarathy had awarded Madhu Balakrishnan 10 points for his solo in the 5 September round. In fact, Mathangi also awarded him 10 points, and, if I recall correctly, the audience gave him full marks too. So, the points he got were not unjustified. (I would have awarded him 11 points ;-)
On the other hand, it does not seem quite right that singers should be sitting in judgement on other singers and their teams against whom they will be competing in other rounds. Except that most of the singers in Sangeetha Maha Yutham seem broad-minded and don't seem to be deliberately awarding low marks to their competitors. Nonetheless, to ensure fairness, the producers could have picked music directors to judge the show. Of course, MDs do have personal relationships with some singers and none would want to offend professional singers. But at least MDs are not peers of singers and the producers could have achieved some semblance of impartiality by roping them in. Also, the MDs won't be participating as contestants so there would not be any conflict of interest.
Second, there are clear imbalances in the quality of the captains and across groups. In terms of the quality of the captains, there is a clear imbalance between Madhu, on the one hand, and Devan and Anupama, on the other. They may have different specialities -- Madhu in singing classically-oriented songs, Anupama in doing Western-style numbers and Devan in harmony. But, at the end of the day, whatever style one sings in (apart from rap, which isn't actually music though it has rhythm), it all boils down to foundational classical training (whether in Carnatic/Hindustani music or Western classical music). This is an area where Anupama and Devan seem lacking. The production team should have been a bit more careful in selecting captains of comparable talent.
As for the groups, I don't know how the contestants were selected or distributed among the captains. Madhu, the most classically-accomplished of the six singing captains, has two weak singers in his group -- Kavya and the Bharath -- and only one talented singer in Suchitra. His is perhaps the weakest team of all. Anupama, on the other hand, has two good singers in Krishnamurthy and Kaushik (who's so cute and adorable) while the third, Monisha, has also improved tremendously and is giving good performances.
On the 5 September show, Madhu's team trailed badly behind Anupama's in the first two rounds. In the duet round, Madhu and Suchitra sang a regular song ("Ding dong koyil mani") predictably well, but Krishnamurthy and Monisha sang a classically-oriented song ("Vedham anuvinil" or something from "Salangai Oli") exceptionally well and therefore got higher marks (so it's not true that Madhu always tilts the balance unfairly). In the medley round, Madhu's team did poorly because of Bharath and, to a lesser extent, Kavya. (Their theme was songs about "Thamizh"." and all were smartly dressed like Tamilians.) In fact, Madhu, paying heed to the judges' comment in an earlier round, graciously kept in the background and let the rest of the team do the bulk of the singing. Anupama's team, on the other hand, did very well in the medley round, with Krishnamurthy flooring the judges through his raucous rendition of the "Maama, maapillai" classic hit. Anupama's team won, naturally.
So, at the end of the two rounds, Madhu's team was lagging far behind Anupama's. But, in the final "Captains' Special", Madhu beat Anupama, and his team emerged the winners. Anupama sang her trademark "Chandralekha" song in husky style, nothing spectacular and flat in some places. Madhu, on the other hand, gave a superb rendition of the Ilayaraja-Yesudas combination "Gangai karai mannan", in Thodi raga, which is extremely challenging to sing. Should he have sung a simpler song to level the playing field? Or should he have sung a challenging song? I think he made the right decision in choosing a harder song than he has ever sung. He could have missed a beat in trying to catch his breath, he could have gone flat. But he did neither of that and even added birgas brimming with emotion. A simpler song would have been too easy for him and would have enabled him to beat Anupama effortlessly. He had to cross a hurdle as much as Anupama had to. So, it was the right choice of songs.
At the end of the day, while Captain Madhu helped a weak team crawl its way back up, as is the role of a captain, Captain Anupama, ironically, dragged down her team of good singers.
So, has the Sangeetha Maha Yutham experiment been a good one -- the idea of having professional singers sing as a team with the amateurs they coach? Is the old formula of professional singers acting as coaches to amateur singers but not themselves singing a better formula (I think they used to do this in some of the Hindi channel shows before the Saibaba group of Mumbai came along with the Sangeetha Maha Yutham formula)? I, for sure, wouldn't be watching this show if it had been the latter formula and Madhu weren't performing ;-)
Sorry for this long, reflective post, Smlash and others.
Edited by Bonheur - 15 years ago
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