Anoushka Shankar shines with Indo-futurist sounds at Brighton Dome

Wrapping up this year's Brighton Festival, where she has been Guest Artistic Director for the past month, Anoushka Shankar took the stage of the city's historic Dome concert hall for a special performance of Chapter 111 We Return To Light, the culmination of a trilogy of mini-albums which include, Chapter 1: Forever For Now; Chapter 11: How Dark It Is Before Dawn. This series has seen Shankar redefining and reimagining the conventions of the sitar as she pushes forward into jazz-electronica and hypnotic trance textures towards an Indo-futurist soundworld.

Joining her for this performance, which draws from all three Chapters, are Arun Ghosh on clarinet and Fender Rhodes, Empirical's Tom Farmer on acoustic bass and Sarathy Korwar on drums and percussion, as she strikes an immediately evocative opening motif on sitar, looped and joined by an ascending electronic tamboura drone. She explains to the jam-packed audience, which includes a beaming Jimmy Page, that the festival has been one of the most magical periods of her life but she had now partially lost her voice so the musicians would speak her thoughts, as she unwinds mystic sitar threads with Farmer's arco drone underlining her words from Korwar. Ghosh's clarinet introduces the melody of 'Daydreaming' and harmonises her sitar line as the pulse gently builds into 'Hiraeth'. Korwar's digital tabla hits punctuate her long haunting sitar lines and looped sarod sounds while his bass drum pushes the tempo, Ghosh and Shankar snaking and circling each other as the piece turns up the heat and builds to a blistering climax.

The sitar and clarinet is a potent and irresistible combination, none more so than 'Dancing on Scorched Earth', which evolves into a snaky trip-hop groove while 'We Burn So Brightly' has Ghosh moving from Bechet to a Shehnai-like tone in an intense, spine-tingling solo, his cone-shaped bell raised to the Dome's exotic roof. Haunting, looped sitar lines introduce 'Traces of You' which immediately cools the heat, weaving clarinet counter melody and the subtlest shakers and stick rhythm before closing out with 'Amirita's beguilingly beautiful sitar/Rhodes circular melody, and the awakening ascent of the morning raga-like 'Daybreak. Against spare, hovering, slightly phased Rhodes notes, Shankar states the probing melody and gradually quickens the pace, picking more stridently as a semi-circular bank of lights project out behind the band, the raga rising to a new day, and the audience to a standing ovation.