Airtel Super Singer 2008 - Stephen Devassy

The dull ‘Airtel Super singer 2008’ bounced back with this week’s Unplugged round. The singers sang melodies with the backing of Piano, performed by Stephen Devassy. What an amazing musician. He is the man behind the orchestration of most of recent Vidhyasagar songs. Listen to the beautiful instrumental album ‘Romanz A’ composed by Stephen Devassy. Stephen’s piano with some amazing vocal performance by the contestants was really goose bumpy to watch. The judges Srinivas, Sujatha and Unnikrishnan also gave beautiful performances with Stephen.

Coming to the elimination this week, it is disappointing to see Arvind being eliminated. I like Arvind’s singing and voice; he has always been a neat performer who doesn’t mess up with the musicality in the name of performing. But that exactly turned out to be his disadvantage. And ofcourse, he isn’t versatile like others. But when singers like Aruna (worst in the present lot according to me) who performed so badly in this round, can stay, why not Arvind? And just because she won some other contest, and she is a good classical singer, how long they are going to retain Ragini Sree, even though she lacks every single quality that a film music singer should have.

Prasanna is a wholesome entertainer, give him any song, he tries to do complete justice to it, though it still has to be seen if he can pull some classical songs that has lot of musical intricacies. Prasanna is one who will sail through the final round. Rohit, a Raajamaniac has a different and deep voice and he sang ‘Kaalai Nera Kaatrae’ beautifully in unplugged round. His best performance so far definitely is the ‘Vathikuchi’ song. Renu definitely has a beautiful voice, but she strains a lot to sing in higher pitches and there is breath control problem also. I didn’t actually like her ‘Munbe Vaa’ performance. Vijay, a Rahmaniac, is versatility personified. He is able to sing all styles of songs with complete conviction, but don’t know how will he approach a pure classical number. I saw him struggling to get the notes right in the grooming session with Sriram Parthasarathy. Anyway, I couldn’t predict how far he could go.

Santosh has cleverly managed with his choice of songs to reach till this round; there is nothing special about his voice or singing according to me. He managed to maintain the emotions of ‘Oh Vannila’ song in unplugged round but musically it was a below par performance. Ranjani is very confident in whatever she sings and she is definitely on my top 3 list. ‘Kannalanae’ rendition in Unplugged round with lot of improvisations was very good but her ‘Muthu Mani maalai’ performance in the duet round is her best so far, according to me. She has a great voice presence and she easily sings in all ranges. If she chooses the right songs; she definitely can reach the top 3. Ajeesh, an ardent Hariharan fan, which is evident from his singing, is a technically sound singer and is versatile enough. His ‘Thoda Thoda’ rendition was superb though he couldn’t match up to SPB’s emotions in the original. He is surely on my Top 3. And Ravi’s ‘Thendrale’ performance was overtly expressive in unplugged round, though he hit every note right. And as I already told, Ravi has that extra edge and professionalism in his singing and most probably he is going to be the winner.