City of London Festival

Drapers’ Hall, London

3 July 2008

Patricia Rozario (soprano)
Roham de Saram (cello)
Julius Drake (piano)

Schubert

Schumann

Mendelssohn

Param Vir: Wheeling Past the Stars (UK premiere)

What the critics say

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 20 July 2008

At the Drapers’ Hall, the soprano Patricia Rozario was joined by the pianist Julius Drake in settings of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan poems by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, and by the cellist Rohan de Saram for the British premiere of Param Vir’s four Tagore settings, Wheeling Past the Stars, players and composer in this case all being Indians long resident here. The music had a quiet sumptuousness, the vocal lines beautifully drawn out, the accompaniment sweetly harmonious, de Saram’s double-stopping as mellifluous as the singing.

Michael Church, The Idependent, Tuesday, 8 July 2008

Rated 4 out of  5 stars

Appearing in a spangled midnight-blue sari in the mock-Renaissance grandeur of Drapers’ Hall, the soprano Patricia Rozario was building bridges, and not only between Art and Mammon. Her aim was to bring the musics of Europe and Asia together under the banner that Daniel Barenboim has commandeered: a West-Eastern Divan.

But Rozario’s programme began by taking that phrase back to its source: Goethe’s title for his great collection of poems in which he used the verse-forms of both continents, and Rozario opened with a series of lieder based on some of the poems. We heard versions of “Suleika” – a romantic lament framed by an Islamic conceit – by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, plus two other Schubert songs in which his creative imagination pushed musical ideas to their limit.

Rozario’s performance was intensely musical, and the higher she went, the more beautiful she sounded, but she didn’t seem to be in her element with this quintessentially German music. Like most lieder, these songs are about sex, and are primarily pitched in the middle register, but hers has little colour or warmth. Though ably accompanied by Julius Drake, she also wasn’t helped by the piano: her light voice needed something less beefy than a Steinway grand, particularly with its lid open.

But the rest of her recital, in which she was joined by cellist Rohan de Saram, was superb. First she and De Saram performed “Wheeling Past the Stars”, a song cycle newly written for them by Param Vir to poems by Tagore: ruminations on life and death, nature, the universe, in which Tagore’s wayward stream of consciousness was reflected in Vir’s wayward tonality. But it was when they launched into John Tavener’s Akhmatova Songs that things caught fire.

Written for Rozario, and tailored to her ability to run the gamut from dread to ecstasy, the songs had a disturbing resonance. Akhmatova lets huge, threatening shapes emerge from the juxtaposition of banal-seeming images: Tavener’s music, delivered through Rozario’s subtle, suggestive art, shadowed the poetry’s every movement.