SHREYA BOSE
Dutch maestro with The Indian Cello
SASKIA RAO DE HAAS
After finishing one of her concerts in France, a couple walked up to Saskia Rao de Haas and
told her about one of their friends who had been diagnosed with cancer. He had played Rao
de Haas’s CD every day for one whole year. They told her that this man believed it was her
music that cured him.
It’s easy for stories like this to go to one’s head, but the
inventor of the Indian Cello holds to her heart a mantra
that has allowed her to coax, from stubborn strings,
lascivious-yet-punishing-yet-pensive tones: Patience.
Reverence. Dedication. Discipline. Speaking to her evokes
the kind of tranquillity you would experience at the end
of a sermon by Thich Nath Hahn; you are convinced that
things are ripe for a positive transition.
Maestro Rao de Haas spent her childhood in a Dutch
village at the border with Amsterdam with windmills and
a river and cows dotting green fields. Her parents played
the piano, her sisters the flute and violin. Her early
training was under Maestro Tibor de Machula who took
pains to emphasise the how basic scales and exercises fit
into the florid manoeuvrings of concertos and sonatas.
She experienced, with him, a technique characteristic of
musical education in India: imitation. Rao would listen to
him play, and instead of looking at the sheet music, would
attempt to replicate him on the instrument. About a year
after this began, it was discovered that could not read
musical notations too well; she had been playing from
memory the entire time.
Her introduction to the Indian classical oeuvre occurred
through a recording of the Dagar Brothers that one of
her teachers, professor Rokus de Groot, played in class.
Rao found herself irreversibly seduced by its easeful
cohabitation of contrasts: the sounds unfurling both rigid
and free, earthly and esoteric.
Her work finds truth in this playful duality. When she
weaves her harmonic way through the Raga Bhimpalasi,
it is with a skill imbued with copious soul, with precise,
distinguished beginnings that shimmer into swathes of
sublime rushes which tap into multiple
emotional responses.
18
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
Rao’s training under the revered Pandit Hariprasad
Chaurasia has allowed her to temper sensibilities
fostered by traditional Western training. As artistic
director of the Indian music program at the Rotterdam
conservatory, he spent about 4 months a year taking
classes in an intensively interdisciplinary curriculum
which brewed a mosaic consciousness of melody:
western art music, jazz music, popular music, tango,