Golden Key for Ghadiali

While participating in the Festival de Chanson Francophone, 24-year-old Farah Ghadiali, a marketing officer at Bombay’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), performed on the same stage as many international artistes and walked off with the Golden Key (a trophy in the shape of the bass clef, a musical note) for singing, as revealed in a write-up forwarded to Parsiana. Organized by the Alliance Francaise de Bombay in association with the Consuls General of France, Belgium, Canada and Switzerland and TV5Monde, this is the first time that the grand festival was held in India.

Having heard about the event through a colleague at work, Ghadiali, whose range varies from higher alto to high soprano, entered the French singing competition on February 10, 2007 at Bombay’s Theosophy Hall and was among the select few chosen to attend the three-day workshop from March 16 to 18, 2007 in "L’Art de La Chanson Francophone” conducted by Catherine May Atlani, directrice artistique. These workshops, held all over the world, focus on the vocal body, i.e. making each participant aware of the relation between the body and the voice and how the former affects the latter. After completing the workshop, Ghadiali was selected winner from India and performed at the gala "Francophonia” at the Tata Theatre, NCPA, on March 20, 2007 along with 10 artistes from France, Belgium, Canada, Romania, Bulgaria, Japan, Netherlands and Switzerland, she conveys.

Farah Ghadiali: wide range and repertoire

Maria Batch­var­ova, winner of many international festivals, presented Ghadiali with the Golden Key after she had sung Edith Piaf’s "La vie en rose” a-cappella (without musical accompaniment). Having trained with Alfred D’Souza, conductor of The Stop Gaps Choral Ensemble since 2005, Ghadiali has passed Grade 5 in solo singing from London’s Trinity College of Music with distinction and will appear for Grade 7 later this year. She plans to do the Performers’ examination next year so that she can pursue a career in music. She has also studied piano with Jeroo Billimoria and scored 89 percent in Trinity College’s Grade 5 theory of music exam. With a repertoire in music that ranges from light classical, jazz and pop to classical and opera singing, her forte, Ghadiali reveals, is sacred music in Latin and Baroque English.

"Music is truly a universal language,” exclaims Ghadiali for whom the French music festival was an unforgettable experience. She was the only person who did not speak French and can barely understand a couple of words in that language! What saddened her, however, was that television channels covering the event interviewed all the foreign artistes but ignored the Indian ones.