PANAJI
Dr Santiago Lusardi Girelli, visiting research professor under the Western Music Chair of the Goa University and the founder of the Goa University Choir, passed away on Wednesday morning at a private hospital in Margao due to Covid related pneumonia. He was hospitalised for almost a month and suffered a cardiac arrest at the end of this long battle with Covid 19.
Head of the Anthony Gonsalves Western Music Chair, Dr Santiago was known for his enthusiasm, leadership and passion for music, philosophy and cultures. He had accomplished several important achievements and recognitions in India as well as the international music world. His brainchild, the GU Choir, had turned into a living institution where people from the Goan community and students from Goa University met to achieve beauty through the ancient and novel practice of singing.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1979, this Argentinian-Italian music conductor, philosopher and scholar of the philosophical traditions of the East and West, had achieved important goals such as singing in more than 20 languages, blending Indian music withthe Gregorian chant, and the performance of the St Matthew's Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach at the Ketevan Sacred Music Festival in collaboration with more than 40 artists coming from Europe and America.
Composed of over 50 people over the years, apart from the students that Dr Santiago taught at the Goa University, GU Choir was an innovative educational, artistic and research project, and probably, the very first university choir in India. A performer with GU Choir, theatre artist and writer Bina Datwani, while expressing her sorrow on behalf of Santiago’s disciples, says, “His suffering is over but ours has just begun. The world will seem soulless without him. But he will never be far away as we will carry him in our hearts forever.”
Remembering GU Choir’s ‘Big Ocean Cantata’ which was premiered on YouTube, as a tribute to Dalai Lama on April 6, 2021, Datwani, also a PR liaison officer for Ketevan Sacred Music Festival, recalls, “This soulful piece was specially composed by Maestro Santiago and dedicated to the 14th Dalai Lama on the occasion of his visit to Goa.”
The live premiere at a unique concert performed by the Goa University Choir on December 11, 2019, at the Kala Academy “ had also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to His Holiness in 1989.
