Composer Vivek Venugopal’s latest album has the pandemic and its after-effects as subjects

Hyderabad-based music composer, producer and guitarist Vivek Venugopal steps ahead on his musical journey with the release of Moods for Violin and Piano, Op. 15. . This album – his eighth – comes with seven parts/movements that encompass a myriad of moods. While the album’s cover art was painted by contemporary artist Naina Maithani, the piece was performed and recorded in March this year by Steinway artist Nadine Jo Crasto (who has a Masters’s from the Royal Academy of Music in London) and violinist Nourhe Khate (who has a Masters from Trinity Laban Conservatory, London) at City Studios in Mumbai.

Vivek, who understands life and makes sense of it through music, created the piece in the summer of 2021, inspired by various moods people experienced during the pandemic. It is like a sonic autobiography with each movement having a little story behind it, he explains.

Myriad moods

While ‘Pensive & Hopeful’ was his ‘new normal’ mood like many others during the pandemic, he was ‘Depressed and Angry with Suppressed Rage’ about an unfulfilled relationship that ended abruptly.

‘Bliss’ expresses a restrained but realistic form of happiness and ‘Uncertain, Confused & Desolate with ‘Covidian angst’ are not just titles of numbers in the album but also the moods that Vivek experienced.

Vivek Venugopal
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

“Uncertain Confused…’ was written over three days; I could translate what I felt during COVID times — the entire one-and-a-half years of our dystopian existence, up until that point — into a little more than one-and-a-half minutes of music. Crazy as it sounds, the semi-eerie music also seemed to be a ‘sonic premonition’ to a minor illness that I faced immediately after completing the movement,” he recalls

The next movement, ‘Whimsical Randomness & Existential Absurdity’, which he wrote after getting better was to make sense of the random and seemingly ‘idiopathic’ illness.

‘Lost & Disenchanted with a Glimmer of Hope’ depicts the feeling of being lost, disenchanted and fatigued, after living through a pandemic.

Vivek considers music a potent elixir of healing. He says, “I face the joys, sorrows, anger, pain, confusion, frustration, peace, optimism, hope and pessimism of life, but I truly understand these emotions through music. It was only natural that my music attempted to cope with, make sense of, and heal the shockwaves and aftereffects of the pandemic.”

Album cover
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

There’s a lot of music to be unleashed as Vivek looks forward to travelling to Russia in October, to record four of his older pieces — two string quartets, 1 wind quintet, and a piece with 10 string and wind instruments. He says, “I was supposed to go earlier this year, but that wasn’t possible due to the third COVID wave. I hope it goes off smoothly this time.”

‘Moods for Violin and Piano, Op. 15’ is available on all streaming platforms.