Christmas 2023: UK-based actor brings her late father's forgotten carols to life with this project

The choir ensemble performs Aaya masih in the studio

ACTOR Meneka Das recalls posing as a choir member and gate-crashing a rehearsal at a church in west London to pitch an idea to choirmaster Paul Ayers, who was rehearsing with his choir there. "He looked at me for a moment; his expressions a mix of curiosity and surprise," shares Das. The idea in question was an international choir arrangement of Aaya masih, a traditional Hindi carol sung across India during Christmas, written by Das' late father, Nirmal K Das, a veteran music composer himself.

Nirmal K Das with his wife Joy

Nirmal Das' compositions like Aaya masih, Sunlo more bhaiyya and Ghabar dootan ke, are performed all over the country and by diaspora around the globe today, often without the knowledge of who wrote them. The a cappella arrangement that features English opera singers fluently singing his poetry is the pilot track of The Christmas Project, an ongoing project that aims to rewrite Das' musical legacy through a series of choral renditions; this time with all due credit.

The actor shares an anecdote from her childhood that drove her to conceptualising the project. "My father had moved to the city from a village in Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, and heard George Frideric Handel's Messiah. Growing up, I often heard him talk about what it would be like to have a choral arrangement of one of his songs. As I moved on to directing for theatre and music, one day during a rehearsal, I had a thought flash through my mind, ‘What about your father's songs, Meneka?' And that's where the journey began," she reveals.

Meneka Das

When we ask Das if Ayers ever recovered from the dramatic gate-crash incident, she tells us laughingly that his bemusement soon gave way to awe when Das sent him a draft of the track a few days later. "He never expected it to be so warm and heartfelt. The next step was for him to make it into a basic choral arrangement. He got deeply involved in the process, listening to my pronunciations and intonations. He wrote out the words and the pronunciations phonetically for the singers," she recalls, adding that the next step was for Andrew Mackay, collaborator and producer, to reach out to young opera singers that he was working with to come and sing the first-ever recording of the new arrangement.

Andrew Mackay

When this writer finally sits down to listen to the inaugural track featuring four English opera singers whose legatos rise and fall in perfect symphony to create a surreal, dreamy sonic experience, Ayers' curiosity, surprise, and subsequent awe, all seem to make perfect sense.

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