It's a celebration of the classical music of South India, with songs in all the main languages - Tamil , Telegu, and Kannada. If you are here then, you should make a point to seeing a performance. At each venue there's usually a lecture and demonstration in the morning, followed by several concerts, each lasting around three hours, in the afternoon and evening.
Most concerts start with a varnam, an uptempo introduction.
There are then several songs. Kirtis or Kirtanas, before the main number. The raga is the basis of Carnatic music. There are 72 main ragas and several hundred variations of each, all organized into a complex classification. Performers to look out for include vocalists K.V.Narayanasami, M.S.Subbulakshmi, T.Brinda, Balamurali Krishna, T.N. Seshagopalan, T.K. Pattammal and Semmangudi Srinivasiyer, violinists TN Krishnan, VV Subramanina, MS Gopalakrishnan, Lalgudi Jayaraman and GLR Krishnan, Veena Players Gayatri and Chitti Babu, Flutists N. Ramani, T. Viswanathan and Sikkil Sisters, Gottuvadyam Player N. Ravi Kiran nagaswaram players Shaik Chinna Moulana Sahib and Namagiripettai, and Mridangam players TK Murthy, Palghat Raghu, Vellore Ramabhadran, Umayalpuram Sivaram and TV Gopalakrishnan.