Bhagawadh Geetha (Recited By: Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao)
Настоящее имя: 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.
