Archives

1. "The miracle of the evening was the conductor" - The New York Daily News 2. "The finest Bruckner performance ..." - The New York Times 3. "Rich, lyrical and deeply moving" - The New York Times 4. "Sheer magic from the podium" - Gannett Newspapers - New York 5. "The Brahms had passion, freshness and enthusiasm" - The New York Post

Starting on Thursday March 14, 2002, and on the second Thursday of each subsequent month, the Taj Samudra will play host to charity dinner concerts featuring top stars of what is described as the world's most sophisticated art form --Grand Opera. Opera Lanka is the idea of Rohan Joseph de Saram and is intended to create greater awareness in Sri Lanka and India of the thrilling art form and top singers who regularly appear on the great stages of the world.

Done in association with Opera Lanka and Opera India, the Taj will now play host to performers who are involved with such august music centres as the Lincoln Centre in New York, the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C., London's famous Covent Garden, La Scala in Milan the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg.

These monthly dinner concerts start at 7 p.m. with a cash bar cocktail hour. The recitals begin at 8 p.m. and will last approximately one hour after which lavish dinners will be served.

All the celebrated singers will be accompanied on the piano by the Artistic Dirctor and Principal Conductor of Opera Lanka and Opera India, Rohan Joseph de Saram. Patrons can also look forward to solo piano works being performed by the conductor during these special evenings. In keeping with the premise of promoting the appreciation of Grand Opera, the solo piano works will have an operatic slant to them as many will come in the form of opera transcriptions by Liszt.

In an interview with the 'Daily News,' Joseph de-Saram said that the corporate response has been overwhelming.

'Sri Lanka can never hope to be a fully developed country unless a thorough grounding of what is internationally a quality of life that is of a high standard. Singapore and Malaysia have come to a level that can be marked by a Euro city. The Arts can never be underestimated for the value of adding to the quality of life,' Joseph de-Saram said, adding that Beethoven and Brahms in Japan account for the largest CD sales in the world. Tokyo is the only city with seven or eight full symphony orchestras, and China is beginning to streamline its structure of Western Classical Music. The country now has performances of opera and symphony concerts and is now seeing the benefits of it.'

When this writer asked whether Western Classical Music is good for India,the conductor said that it is. When I likened the effect of having opera and other forms of western classical music sponsored by the corporate sector in Sri Lanka as having the same effect as international cricket and the World Cup had on the image of Sri Lanka abroad, he said that it was a good comparison.

Joseph de-Saram said that Carnegie Hall gives New York a cache like no other city has. English is now universal and companies funding foreign foundations, especially opera is a fantastic thing.

Rohan Joseph de-Saram descended on Sri Lanka in quite a blaze of glory in 1990 or so. All his concerts were sellouts. Here was a conductor who was more than capable of conducting any great symphony orchestra in the world. We had never heard or seen anything like it before. Of course, Sir Malcolm Sargeant was here some decades ago to conduct his great symphony orchestra, and there have been lesser lights as well. But this the performances of Joseph de-Saram, a Sri Lankan, were exciting and audiences had never before experienced such music before.

Joseph de-Saram is by no means a benign conductor- or person--for that matter. He talks you directly and sometimes in tones not everyone would tolerate; he conducts a press conference as though he were wielding the conductor's baton in Richard Wagner's 'Entrance of the Gods into Valhallah.'

He once said of himself at an interview with a newspaper that his was a 'split personality', a sort of benevolent tyrant, one might echo. He has been called many things by many people mostly by those who know little or nothing about Western Classical Music but it just passes over his head; sometimes he also enjoys it!

Opera is a musical form that is unique but in this age of rapid changes, globalization and a consistent demolition of elitism and its appendages, opera is seen as being the preserve of the idle rich. It is not a popular art form of the lower rungs. However, paradoxically, the performance of Grand Opera is more widespread than it has ever been before.

India is now experiencing a new high in the genre through Opera India which has been in existence for some years now and is drawing increasingly large audiences among Bollywood types and the business community because Opera India is funded by India's leading industrial companies.

In Sri Lanka there is no tradition of Western Classical Music being appreciated countrywide, let alone Western Grand Opera. There have been the occasional performances in the past decade or so by some of the not-so-famous opera singers, but never came to stay.

For the performance of the art form in Sri Lanka, there has to be solid sponsorship, and this can only come about by the involvement of the corporate sector.

International cricket in which Sri Lanka is very involved has put the country on the international map will Opera Lanka be able to do the same?

He told this writer in an interview that he is optimistic that the venture could be successful.

Rohan Joseph de-Saram would need to be re-introduced to a new Sri Lankan audience; those who have been to his concerts and recitals in the early ninetees would not need their minds to be refreshed. Anyone who has heard and seen Joseph de-Saram conducting the Lanka Philharmonic Orchestra, the Petite Philharmonic and the Philharmonic Pops Orchestra, or playing Liszt at one of his piano recitals, would not forget the experience.

Born in Sri Lanka to former newspaper columnist E.M.W. Joseph, better known as Sooty Banda in what is popularly believed to have been the Golden Age of local English journalism, and painter Sita Joseph de-Saram who survives her husband, Rohan often confused with cellist Rohan de Saram began his music studies at age five and made his debut in Colombo at age sixteen as soloist in Liszt's First Piano Concerto shortly after which he proceeded to New York winning a scholarship to Claudio Arrau's Piano School in NY. He was also taught by pianists in the US, Adele Marcus, Raymond Lewenthal and William Chaisson. In 1978, Joseph de-Saram had the distinction of being apprenticed to the Austrian conductor Dr. Carl Bamberger.

At the end of the apprenticeship he was launched upon the international scene with a successful debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At age 26 Joseph de-Saram made his Carnegie Hall debut in Bruckner's Third Symphony. Debuts at the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center followed soon after. His South American debut in Mahler's Fifth Symphony was held in 1982.

Joseph de-Saram had the distinction of being made Music Director of New York's American Philharmonic Orchestra for four years.

Artistes such as Lily Kraus, Abbey Simon and Erick Friedman, to name only a few and well-known opera singers have appeared under his direction. Another honour was that the famous Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson requested Joseph de-Saram to conduct her farewell concert at the Lincoln Center.

In 1990 Joseph de-Saram made his recording debut with The London Philharmonic in Prokofiev's 'Stone Flower' and the 'Cinderella' ballets. The conductor has been at the helm of world and New York premieres of works by Adler, Mennin and Persichetti.

Joseph de-Saram was principal guest conductor of Mexico's Orquesta Sinfonica de Xalapa and Music Director of Sri Lanka's Lanka Philharmonic, Petite Philharmonic and the Philharmonic Pops Orchestras.

The conductor specialises in Bruckner, Mahler and the Russian composers as well as in the Verdi operas. As a pianist he specializes in the works of Chopin and Liszt. Further specialization involves the piano concerti of Mozart which he conducts from the keyboard. Rohan Joseph de-Saram is considered by the Western press to be 'one of the most exciting conductors on the international scene today.'His many rave reviews from the world's foremost music critics bear ample testimony to this fact. 

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