Sunday, September 22, 2013
SASKIA RAO-DE HAAS (born 1971) is a virtuoso cellist and
composer from the Netherlands based in New Delhi, India.
She is married to the sitarist Shubhendra Rao.
Saskia was born
in Abcoude, the Netherlands in a family of music lovers. Saskia studied
cello under the Hungarian cellist Tibor de Machula and went on to do
a Masters in Ethnomusicology from the University of Amsterdam and
the Conservatory of Rotterdam where she studied under Hari
Prasad Chaurasia and Koustuv Ray.
She first came to India in 1994 where she studied Indian music
under Dr. Sumati Mutatkar at the Delhi University. Subsequently, she has also
been tutored by Pandit D.K. Datar, Pandit Deepak Chowdhury and Pandit
Shubhendra Rao.
Saskia Rao de Haas has performed at a number of traditional
festivals, such as the Dover Lane Conference in Kolkata and
the Harvallabh Sangeet Samelan in Jalandhar.She has also
performed at the ‘Vasanta Habbha’ in Bangalore, the ‘Maihar’ festival and
the ‘Haridas Sangeet Sammelan’ in Lucknow. She has also performed at
numerous international venues including the Kennedy Centreat Washington,
D.C. and the Esplanande in Singapore. They are also scheduled to
play at the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games at Glasgow in 2014.
Saskia is acclaimed for bridging the Western and Indian
classical music traditions. She is an accomplished Western classical cellist,
plays folk music from Eastern Europe and has composed music
for dance, film and theatre. Rao-de Haas composed music for the dance group
Raga Mala and created an Indian string quartet in her piece
'Mukhani'. She developed, together with Shubhendra, a collection of pieces for
sitar and cello with percussion under the collective name 'East marries West'.
Saskia's contribution to Hindustani classical music through
the Indian cello, an instrument fashioned out of the cello to enable
it to be played in Indian classical concerts. The Indian Cello was fashioned by
the violin maker Eduard van Tongeren with five playing strings and
ten sympathetic strings. It is smaller in size than its western
counterpart, thus enabling Saskia to sit on the floor while playing it. The
addition of an extra playing string on a higher octave and the ten
sympathetic strings further enriches the tonal quality of the Indian cello.
Saskia married sitarist Shubhendra Rao in 2001. They have a son,
Ishaan and live in the C R Park locality of New Delhi.
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