Bhagawadh Geetha (Recited By: Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao)

(From The Channel Dilip SK - @24bit192khtz. A short history about how Ghatasala's recitation of the Geetha came to be) "In a felicitation ceremony with Lata Mangeshkar at Ravindrabharati, Hyderabad, Lata ji gifted Ghantasala garu an LP of Bhagavadgita that was sung by her. After listening to it, Ghantasala garu got inspired to do the same in Telugu, along with commentary for selected Gita's verses. He had chosen 108 slokas from all the 18 chapters that he thought could be an escence of Gita. He composed each sloka himself on various Ragas. Meanwhile, he was not well due to hyper tension. But he didn’t stop working on his dream project of this. It took nearly 6 months to complete this composition. After he got relatively well, he wanted to go for recording. He asked his wife to get a pair of saffron clothes. His idea was to record Gita by wearing safron clothes. His wife got his white clothes coloured in saffron colour. He recorded first part of Gita in 2 days. Unfortunately he fell sick again and it took another 6 months to record the second part. (That is why you could see his tone was bit different in the second cassette/LP). Ghantasala garu requested HMV to send a sample of his recordings, but due to some logistic issues HMV delayed the release of Bhagavadgita cassettes/LPs and they couldn’t share a copy. Sadly, Ghantasala garu left this world without listening to his own version of Bhagavadgita. But he left this great treasure to us. There is absolutely no Telugu audience who had never heard Bhagavadgita recited by Ghantasala garu at least once in their lives. " Note: HMV(EMI) and RPG released the Ghatasala's Geetha on CD. To save costs they cut the version to fit onto 1 disc. Many music sequences were cut out (similar to M. S. Rama Rao's Sundarakandamu). They also decided to merge the stereo channels (the difference can be heard on the linked youtube videos on Volumes 1 and 2.