Amaan Ali Bangash

Amaan Ali Bangash is a sarod player, performing on a plucked, fretless Indian string instrument known for its deep, resonant slides between notes. He appears with the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus in a program pairing Western orchestral works with pieces that blend Indian classical and orchestral idioms, including a piece by his father, Amjad Ali Khan.

Listeners can expect the sarod's distinctive sound: strings plucked with a triangular pick and fretless metal fingerboard that lets notes bend and glide into one another rather than jump cleanly between pitches, producing a voice-like, singing quality. On this program the instrument is placed alongside a full orchestra in "Samaagam," a work built to let Indian melodic ornamentation and Western harmonic writing meet within the same piece, and in "Flash, Shimmer, Glow, Spark," a newer work by Reena Esmail-adjacent composer Bansal exploring similar territory. The rest of the evening, Dukas's famous sorcerer's-apprentice tone poem and an Enescu rhapsody built from Romanian folk tunes, gives context for how orchestras have long borrowed from folk and non-Western sources, making the sarod's appearance feel like part of a larger conversation rather than a novelty insert.