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.

- Shreya Bose

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.