Performance

Background image, "From the Lighthouse"

My life as a performer

Shrish in a blue shirt, holding his Pacific Violone in Viennese tuning, Seth Kimmel Bass #72, made in 2022.

Shrish is a classical double bassist. He is at home performing in orchestral and chamber music, and enjoys working with fellow composers to premiere their new work. Shrish has performed standard repertoire, including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Shostakovitch, and Rimsky-Korsakov. One piece of particular importance is Mahler’s First Symphony; he performed the double bass solo in 2020 in a partial performance, and was a section player in a complete performance at Temple Performing Arts Center. Shrish is also a performer for opera and musical theatre orchestras, with experience from Mozart’s Idomeneo to Curtains, Camelot, and The Sound of Music.
He has also performed contemporary works, including Nina Siniakova’s Arrows for 3 Cellos and Double Bass. In his capacity as a composer, Shrish has also composed works for himself, many of which he performed during his undergraduate years, including the 3 pieces titled Songs Without Words. In May 2023, he co-coordinated and was the double bassist in Temple Composers’ Orchestra, which recorded five pieces by student composers, including Shrish’s own Symphonia Parva.

Shrish is interested in Historically-Informed double bass performance, with an interest in baroque- and classical-era repertoire. This includes performing on baroque bass as part of a basso continuo section, and learning more about historical performance practice. As part of this evolving interest, he began playing viola da gamba in 2021, and G violone in 2022. Shrish is capable of playing on any size viola da gamba, but particularly favors the tenor, bass, and G violone sizes.

He has performed on tenor and bass viola da gamba, G violone, and Viennese violone with Temple University Early Music Ensemble and bass viola da gamba with La Fiocco.

As another outgrowth of his interest in historical performance, Shrish also performs on Viennese violone. This instrument was popular around Vienna in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was known to both Haydn and Mozart. This instrument had a flourishing repertoire of concerti (by Waňhal, Hoffmeister, Dittersdorf, and Sperger, among others) and solos composed for it, including the bass solos in Haydn’s Symphonies 6, 7, and 8; and Mozart’s concert aria, “Per Questa Bella Mano.” Shrish has performed with this instrument in this tuning for works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

Shrish is also a tabla player, which he learned from Pandit Samir Chatterjee and Gokul Panda as a child. He is a capable accompanist, and works closely with the vocalist or instrumentalist to capture the atmosphere of the performance and the mood of the rāga.

Although he is primarily an instrumentalist, Shrish has also performed as a vocalist with Epiphany Singers, a Philadelphia-based choir, as a member of its bass section since 2023.

His double basses are a Strobel MB-500 double bass with 4 strings (orchestral tuning with low C extension; and Seth Kimmel #72, a Pacific Violone model with 5 strings (currently in Viennese tuning; see photo at left). Shrish has studied double bass with Art Stephano, Chris Clark, and Heather Miller Lardin.