Private Passions

Michael Berkeley's guest today is the sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, one of the stars of world music today. She studied exclusively with her father, the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, made her debut at age 13 in New Delhi, and released her first solo recording in 1998. In 2001 her third album, Live at Carnegie Hall, was nominated for a Grammy award. In 2002 she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in a tribute concert to the late George Harrison, conducting a new piece by her father which featured Eric Clapton on solo guitar. Until 2005 she was primarily a solo performer of Indian classical music, but in that year she branched out with her fourth album, Rise, a fusion of East and West employing both acoustic and electric instrumentation, on which she appeared as composer, arranger and producer. It won her another Grammy nomination. She toured extensively in the wake of the new album, forming the Anoushka Shankar Project to present her new non-classical ensemble works to a live audience, an