There are some tempting nuggets scattered across the *Alchemy* season, the South Bank’s five-day celebration of Indian and South Asian arts. The young group of improvisers the Teak Project play a free show at the QEH today, for instance, and the festival closes on Sunday with a screening of the classic Bollywood epic *Sholay*. Sadly, the cornerstone of the event, a celebration of the relentlessly prolific screen and stage composer A. R. Rahman, turned out to be a bottom-numbing test of endurance.
Thanks to the runaway success of *Slumdog Millionaire*, Rahman is very much a global brand. Even if you think Danny Boyle’s movie was a stupendously overrated sliver of melodrama with pseudo-documentary trimmings, there is no denying that it arrived at a propitious moment, when the new India was claiming its place on the international stage. But as the conductor Matt Dunkley and the London Philharmonic dutifully waded through one anodyne film sequence after another, it became clear that much of Rahman’s instrumental music has the same well-manicured but lifeless qualities as those chains of five-star hotels that cater to our global elite. The evening had opened with dancers decorously passing through the aisles holding stylised diva candles. Thereafter the proceedings took a more anonymous course. The programme crammed in material from all directions, including extracts from the score to *Elizabeth: The Golden Age* and the Hollywood comedy *Couples Retreat*. Rahman, a self-effacing figure who sat in the stalls, announced that he saw the evening as an opportunity to showcase “the other side of me”. While the vocalist Alma Ferovic and the Metro Voices choir gave sturdy performances of the multiplex fare, many of Rahman’s admirers at this sell-out show may have been left wishing that more room could have been made for his more conventional writing for playback singers. Naturally enough, the brief *Slumdog* extracts won loud applause, the guest sitar player Asad Khan injecting passion into the fusion of classical Indian textures and brasher Western pop figures. The flautist Naveen Kumar added another layer of much-needed local colour during his cameo appearances. Although the theme from *Roja* lingered in the memory, we were back in the airport departure lounge for the stage musical of *The Lord of the Rings*. A hint of Celtic mist had hung in the air earlier in the evening; now we were wallowing in overripe anthems, the full-blooded singer Michael Rouse marching off into the rain-swept hills.
