No, New York Philharmonic Didn’t Play Tamil Song ‘Rajavin Parvaai'!

The video is an edited one, where Tamil song Rajavin parvaai's audio has been added to clips from different videos.

A video of an orchestra performing an instrumental version of the song 'Rajavin Parvaai' from the Tamil film Anbe Vaa has gone viral on social media, claiming that it shows the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performing a rendition of the song.

The claim was also shared in 2022.

(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here and here.)

Is it true?: No, the video was first shared on a YouTube channel which goes by the name Vimal Percy.

• Under the video, Percy clarified that he had reproduced the song in a "symphony style" and used bits from different orchestra videos for visuals.

• We also found some visuals that matched a few frames from the viral video, which were taken from different videos available on YouTube.

How did we find out?: We did not find any videos of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performing the song mentioned in the claim on their YouTube channel.

• The top portion of the viral video carried text in English which read "Rajavin parvai Raniyin pakkam."

• Taking a cue from this, we used additional keywords to look for more details.

• This led us to a video uploaded on a channel called Vimal Percy, which carried a blurred version of this viral video.

We were able to match this video with the one in the viral claim because of the same audio in both clips, as well as similar icons on the sides of both videos.

• In the video's description box, Percy mentioned that he had tried to "reproduce this song in a symphony style" and that he had "added some bits and pieces of Orchestra videos to support the music and this is not real orchestra which played the song."

• A note in the description mentioned that he had added the orchestra's video to give viewers some visual context for the instruments being played, but later blurred the video to avoid misleading people.

• We also noticed that Percy had replied to some comments about the video being unrelated, saying that he had thought it would improve the viewing experience "but it backfired completely."

• "I thought I made very obvious that is fake but seems not the case. Water under the bridge!," Percy's response read.

Where is the original video from?: While looking for the source of the video, we learnt that the viral video was made using clips from several different videos.

• We took screenshots of the viral video and ran reverse image searches on them.

• This led us to a nine-year-old video that identified the woman playing a string instrument was Hilary Hahn, an American violinist performing a piece by Austrian classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

• A reverse image search on another frame from the video took us to a series of images on the website hdvdarts.com, which published videos for "promoting interest in high-definition videos of fine-arts subjects."

• Here, we found an image of wind instrument players which was similar to a frame from the viral video. The page mentioned that it was taken during a performance of Czech composer Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection").

While we could not independently verify where the other visuals of the viral video were taken from, we can confirm that the video and the audio in the claim are not from the same performance.

Conclusion: The New York Philharmonic orchestra did not play the Tamil song 'Rajavin Parvaai'. The viral video is made with an audio track of the Tamil song layered over different clips of orchestra performances.

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