Mumbai to Holland, via Dutch-style baroque music

The sun has just set. India's lone surviving opera house, the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, is lit up to show off its restored glory — white baroque edifice, ornate foyer with pastel green walls, gilded ceilings beckoning — its stained glass windows and red carpet leading up to the balconies from the stalls. Doyens and delegates have assembled at the recently distinguished UNESCO world heritage site for a performance by Dutch musicians David van Ooijen and Adelina Hasani.

It'd be safe to say that the culturally eclectic Holland meets Mumbai month is set for an aesthetic wind up.

Matching the splendour of the auditorium in her glittering blue-gold gown, Hasani leads with her violin evoking emotions intense, playful, fiery and melancholy, as the duo play 15 pieces by various greats, while Ooijen enthrals with his lute, lending the instrumental performance an underlying tranquility. The soirée concludes with a piece by classical giant, composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Later, Hasani tells me that the final piece kept her violin busy, "because the texture of the solo part is complex, using all the possibilities you can have with a violin".

But the auditorium performance we see today wasn't how it happened in Netherlands of the 17th century. Ooijen says, "The Dutch in the Golden Age had lots of money, but they spent most of it indoors. One of the pieces I played is a prayer that, if you have an instrument at home, you could play for the family. The music that came out of Netherlands was essentially intimate." Ooijen's performance of a solo by Nicolas Vallet, for which he asks us to close our eyes and imagine being inside a beautiful room painted by Vermeer (Johannes) where there's a beautiful girl with a lute demonstrated that idea of intimacy. In contrast, the Italians and French, he says, "were all about showing off their wealth. If you were rich in Italy or France, you'd have a palatial building, with a concert hall to entertain friends. So baroque music there was much more exuberant". But because Holland was an "open society with money, artists would come from other places to set up business, compose and even teach," adds Ooijen.

Traditionally, baroque music could be played with a number of instruments. "There were instruments you could play solo, and ones that served as accompaniment — the theorbo, harp, double bass, or cello...any from the continuum group". While the violin, according to Hasani, "has since changed and taken a different path, the lute is special for retaining its original form." Ooijen admits the lute had died in between, only to be revived in the 20th century. With the violin's role having modernised, Hasani finds that it now offers less scope for improvisation, which is an important element of baroque music.

Today, the audience for baroque, one is told, is "largely elderly, but the professional artistes sometimes range from 20-30 years of age. It is played a lot in Netherlands (the Hague is a good place to study it), but is also known all over Western Europe."

Due to its history of personal consumption, it would appear, Dutch baroque music has not been able to seize the modern-day popularity of its Italian counterpart. But if one were to judge by the rapture of the Royal Opera House audience, that would be a tough conclusion to reach.