With a new opera out and weekend party primetime raging, Finney was only a third full on Friday, Nov. 16. But if the audience seemed a tad small, Pandit Rajeev Taranath did not seem perturbed.

“Each time I come to the United States, I try to come to Oberlin,” said the sarod master. He talked with a deep, hoarse voice, something like smoke. “I am very happy to be here.”

Those at the Chapel that evening witnessed the fabled Taranath and sitarist Kartik Seshadri in what was their first onstage collaboration. Taranath performed first, upon a slightly raised platform. To his right was Arup Chattopadhyay, one of the most highly sought after tabla accompanists. Taranath and Chattopadhyay were strangers, having spoken only briefly before the show.

“Yet there are many assumptions that are common to both of us,” said Taranath. As he adjusted his instrument in sweeps, Chattopadhyay followed suit, raising a tiny chiseled hammer to the smaller of his two-drum tabla set and tapping the braided head gently with an ear inclined toward the drum. This smaller drum, the dayan, is meticulously calibrated to either the tonic, dominant or subdominant of the soloist’s key. The larger drum, the dagga, has a less defined bass tone.

Chattopadhyay fell casually into silence as the sarod slid into “Song of the Bird,” a romantic piece improvised within predetermined perimeters of tala (“rhythmic”) and raga (“melodic”) frames. Taranath permutated and extended the set with luminous technical precision, borne by Conservatory junior Phillip Smith on the tambura and, in due time, by Chattopadhyay on the tabla.

“It’s not like a drumbeat and a soloist,” said Smith, on the role of the tabla. “The melodic instrument and tabla interact and have conversations through the music…these guys were all trained from a young age by masters, and spent many, many years learning and practicing, so their roots are very deep and their ears are very developed.”

Seshadri, who is acknowledged as the foremost musical heir of Pandit Ravi Shankar, followed up with four solo selections. The first was a non-metric meditative; the second and third, freer movements. The fourth, an original composition by Seshadri himself, ran on pliant, elliptical circuits of eleven beats. He and Taranath picked up the second half of the program with the Mishra Kafi, a Hindustani classical staple. Mishra Kafi is lyric fantasy that leaves ample berth for embellishment and interaction between the voices — space that was navigated deftly with a keen ear and eye contact.

“Their understanding of rhythm and melody is beyond comprehension,” said Smith. “It was really like being onstage with angels or something like that, because they were so refined, the music was so pure and their energy was so positive.”

Smith, a classical guitar major, met the artists at their pre-concert lecture on north Indian classical music.

“They spoke about how the split between north and south Indian music that some scholars talk about isn’t as solid as one might think. They both share the same ragas, and the main difference is that south Indian music is more focused on text and conveying the spiritual message in the text. The two traditions are completely connected to spirituality in a way that lots of Westerners can’t really understand. For these guys, music is a spiritual path that influences their entire lives and brings about transformation,” said Smith.

His debut on the tambura parallels the traditional approach to Hindustani classical discipleship, in which the pupil is placed for years on the long-necked lute to sonically shade in the master’s melody.

“The tambura, along with the drone strings on the sitar and sarod, supply the tonal center, which is usually around C. The strings of the tambura are tuned to the root, the fifth and possibly the third or fourth of the basic ‘scale’ that makes up the raga,” said Smith.

“It was absolutely amazing to be onstage, and I hadn’t realized beforehand what an honor it would be,” Smith continued. “On the other hand, it’s really hard to sit cross-legged like that for so long if you haven’t done it every day of your life for seven hours. It got a bit uncomfortable after a while. Luckily, I had been doing yoga for a while before this show. If this had happened a year ago, I would have been toast.”