Lotus Concert for Feb 2011

Janani Kumar (vocal)

Janani Kumar has been learning Carnatic vocal music from Guru Smt. Anuradha Sridhar for the last six years. She has participated in many of her school’s productions including the recently performed “Salutations to the Guru”, and the Cleveland Aradhana last year. She has won prizes in the Krithi and Harikatha categories at the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana in 2009 and has also won prizes in the Papanasam Sivan festivals in the Bay area in 2008 and 2009. A freshman at Burlingame High School, Janani enjoys reading, dancing, and travelling.

Harini Jaganathan (violin)

A vocal and violin student of Smt. Anuradha Sridhar, Harini Jaganathan has given vocal and violin solo concerts in the Bay Area and has been an accompanist at Lotus, Nandalala, and Swaralahari. She has won prizes in the violin and the vocal categories at the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana and Papanasam Sivan celebrations. She is a junior at Cupertino High. She is the News Editor for her school newspaper and enjoys pencil drawing.

Vocal: Megha Ranganathan

Megha Ranganathan, a junior at Cupertino High School, has been learning Carnatic Vocal Music since age six from Smt. Jayashree Varadarajan, artistic director of Sri Rama Lalitha Kala Mandir School of Fine Arts. She has given several concerts both in India and here in the US. She has participated in various productions of her music school and performs regularly for many festivals and organizations around the Bay Area.

Megha is also a self-taught keyboard player and has accompanied her music school on the keyboard for various occasions. She has won numerous awards for both singing and playing keyboard in competitions such as the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana, OSAAT, and the Papanasam Sivan Competition.

Megha is also a Bharatanatyam dancer under the tutelage of Smt. Mythili Kumar and performed her dance arangetram in Feb 2008. She continues to learn, teach classes and perform in her dance school’s productions.

She is a Yuva kendra student and a teacher assistant in Chinmaya Mission San Jose. She has sung all the one hundred bhajans in the10 CD set titled Bhakti Rasamrutam to raise funds for the Chinmaya Mission Building Project. In addition to that, she has participated in various Chinmaya Mission fundraising programs, including Chinmaya Vaibhavam and more recently, Jnana Ganga.

Violin: Divya Ramachandran

Divya Ramachandran was first initiated to the violin at the age of 5 when she began learning Western classical music. She later started learning Carnatic (South Indian Classical) violin with Sri S.N. Narasimhan in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A. Since 1999, she has been receiving advanced training from Sri Mullaivasal G. Chandramouli, a renowned violinist based in Chennai, India. She performs regularly in a number of U.S. cities, as well as in India. She also performs duets with her sister Deepa.

Mridangam: Vignesh Venkataraman

Vignesh, a senior at Monta Vista High School, is a mridangam artist hailing from Umayalpuram Sri. K. Sivaraman’s school of music. Vignesh was initiated into playing Mridangam by Sri. Anand Iyer, also from the same school. For the past 5 years, Vignesh has been traveling to India every summer undergoing advanced training under the tutelage of Umayalpuram Sri. K. Sivaraman.

Vignesh has accompanied various artists in concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has participated in competitions at the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana and has won several prizes in both categories.

Vignesh is also learning vocal carnatic music from Smt. Meena Kodhandaraman, a disciple of Sri. M.S.Anantharaman, and more recently from the violin maestro Sri. R.K. Shriramkumar.