Youthful Shankar and daughter bend time with music

The sublime music-making, of course, tops all - what better way to have spent a couple of hours Sunday night than taking in peerless Indian sitarist/composer Ravi Shankar's concert with stellar protege and daughter Anoushka at the Kimmel Center?

Contemplate time: After a seven-decade career, even with his ample virtuosic vigor, just how many more times will Philadelphia witness on stage the semiretired 88-year-old master, whose genius and humanity classical titan Yehudi Menuhin likened to Mozart's?

(Sunday was Shankar's third engagement at Verizon Hall since the venue opened in 2001.)

Backed by two droning tamboura players and acclaimed tabla performer Tanmoy Bose, Shankar came off as impossibly youthful at the Kimmel, grinning widely during his dizzying melodic flourishes, face deeply expressive as he showered notes by bending strings across the sitar's scalloped fretboard. Initiating, matching or responding, he led Anoushka in joyful instrumental frolic, particularly on the last of three pieces.

After the honey-sweet "Raga Madhuvanti" and "Raga Desh," the concert's entire second half was a semiclassical thumri, a savory stew in which bits of jaunty folk song or anything else may surface. Intimations of family friend George Harrison's music emerged; when her father slipped in some "Yankee Doodle," the younger Shankar giggled with the crowd.

Anoushka Shankar now divides time among her native London, the family home in New Delhi, and the United States. She picked up the sitar at age 8 and proved a precocious quick study, first performing with her father five years later. (A 1996 Teens Today cover story on her was headlined "Trad, Rad and Just 15!?") Now 27, Shankar is in full artistic bloom and prodigiously talented, having released five albums ranging from Indian classical and cutting-edge electronica to a collaboration with Grammy-winning half-sister Norah Jones.

On Sunday, however, she was clearly content to be another pupil of the revered Pandit Shankar, if also his engaging in-concert foil. Her biggest smiles flashed when she glanced over at father, her head shaking in rhythm and amazement anew, lost in those moments when he didn't so much stop time as temporarily dispel it with another transcendent flicker of singular musical brilliance. Timeless, indeed.