East meet West: Pianist Raymond Yiu × Deepak Shah with Tabla & Slide Guitar

Kala Festival’s special evening in Hoxton Hall invites you to hear Indian raga converse with Western harmony in real time. Pianists Raymond Yiu and Deepak Shah lead the exploration, joined by tabla maestro Ustad Akram Khan and slide-guitar virtuoso Pandit Debasis Chakroborty. Delicate microtonal phrases slip into tempered scales; tala cycles such as Teental and Rupak glide across Western metres; slow vilambit meditations blossom into brisk drut passages, their arcs carried by improvisation inspired equally by alap, jor and jazz. Western chord progressions and counterpoint shimmer beneath single-line raga melodies, while the piano is coaxed to bend notes like sitar and sarod, expanding its dynamic range from near-silent breath to stadium-filling crescendo. The result is a structural tapestry where two traditions trade ideas without surrendering identity, offering Indian-music devotees a fresh vantage and Western listeners an immediate doorway into the depth of raga. Seats are limited, and curiosity is running high across the city.

Raymond Yiu, a Hong-Kong-born pianist now based in London, made his concerto debut with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in Edinburgh at age seventeen, won Aberdeen Young Musician of the Year and later graduated with distinction from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, building a reputation for supple interpretations from Mozart to Prokofiev.

Deepak Shah is celebrated as the Raaga Pianist. He grew up in a musical Mumbai family and reimagines Hindustani ragas on the grand piano, a project that has taken him to stages worldwide and into more than fifty commercial recordings while preserving the rhythmic discipline he first learned on tabla.

Ustad Akram Khan represents the seventh generation of the Ajrara gharana; since his international debut in Norway at twenty-two, he has logged over eleven thousand concerts, earned top-grade status from All India Radio, and become one of the most sought-after ambassadors of the tabla tradition.

Pandit Debasis Chakroborty, an “A”-grade Prasar Bharati artist from the Senia-Maihar lineage, wields a modified three-octave slide guitar whose Gayaki-and-Tantrakari phrasing bridges vocal nuance and instrumental fire; his performances and teaching posts from Monash University to Mangalayatan attest to a career devoted to widening the instrument’s expressive horizons.