Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Dura Penena Thanithala - An old Sinhala song.



email from Piyusha Atapattu 



I like to share this beautiful message concerning the origin of an old song - Dura Penena Thanithala. If you remember, this was a very popular song in early 1950s. Some of us may even have sung it in school.

If you open the two links below - In the first link you will be able to listen to the original song sung by Vivien de Silva Boralessa and Kanthi Wakwella.  The second link will give you access to the newer version of the same song sung by Nanda Malini and TM Jayaratne. It will take about 3.5 minutes each to listen to the two versions of the song.  

The story of the song given below is very interesting.........




In 1947 before some of us were born Karunaratne Abeysekara, Sarath Wimalaweera and BS Perera the musician were travelling in a car to Anuradhapura for some official function of Radio Ceylon.
Both KA and SW were famous lyricists at the time.  SW suggested to KA to write a song on Anuradhapura which went unnoticed hence SW himself wrote a song. SW passed it onto BSP who took it home and composed music for the lyrics. A friend of BSP helped him to compose the song and that friend was Vivien de Silva Boralessa's father. The three of them decided that VdeSB herself would sing the song along with Kanthi Wakwella a young male singer at the time. That was the origin of that beautiful song Dura Penena Thanithala.....Vivien de Silva Boralessa and Kanthi Wakwella first sang this in 1948 live for a Sarala Gee programme conducted by Radio Ceylon.
This was a watershed moment in Sinhala music. Until then Sinhala musicians followed Uttara Bharathiya Ragadhari music in composing Sinhala songs but this is the first time Western music was introduced to a Sinhala song by a musician ie BS Perera. He introduced waltz type of ballroom music to this song which became extremely popular even amongst the villagers. This was mainly because the lyrics carried a Buddhist theme. 
Dura Penena Thanithala.... was first recorded under HMV label in 1950. It took 3 days for the song to be recorded. There was only one microphone for both the singers and the orchestra. Recording was done under a shed coverd with corrugated sheet on the roof. When they started to record the song heavy rain came down and with the noice of rain drops falling on corrugated sheet recording was impossible. Rain continued for 2 more days but both days the orchestra and the singers assembled under the shed with no respite. Finally the recording was done when the rain stopped. When the song went on sale it went like UNUKEVUM they say. HMV gave VdeSB some Rs 600 and a radiogramme as a present. 
Last year she was interviewed by ITN and she sang this song along with one of her sons. She was 87yrs then.
The new version of the song is sung by Nanda Malini and TM Jayaratne.
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