DeshamanyaFrank Rohan de Saram (9 March 1939 – 29 September 2024) was a British and Sri Lankan cellist who was focused on contemporary music both as a soloist and as the cellist of Arditti Quartet from 1979 to 2005.
He learned both Western music and Kandyan traditional drumming in Sri Lanka early in life, and studied cello in Italy from age 11, and further in England and with Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico. He made an international career playing in London's Royal Festival Hall (1956) and Wigmore Hall (1959), and Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1960.
De Saram became fascinated with contemporary music in 1972, when he performed Nomos Alpha for solo cello by Iannis Xenakis. He joined the Arditti Quartet from 1977. Both as a soloist and with the quartet he performed world premieres and recorded new music; he collaborated with influential composers, beginning with Kodály, Poulenc and Shostakovich. Several of them composed music for him, such as Luciano Berio's Sequenza XIV.
Life and career
Frank Rohan de Saram was born to Ceylonese parents in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, on 9 March 1939.[1][2] His father, Robert de Saram, who trained as a lawyer,[3] and his mother, Miriam Pieris Deraniyagala, a dancer,[2] had met and married in England.[3] His mother had studied voice and violin in London where her father, Sir Paul Pieris-Daraniyagala, was working.[3] Because of World War II, the family moved by ship to their homeland.[3]
Childhood in Ceylon
The family lived in Colombo, where the father worked as a lawyer. The boy attended the kindergarten of Bishop's College and S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. He grew up with three siblings, Skanda, Druvanand "Druvi" and Niloo.[3][4] The father was passionate about music, a skilled pianist and interested in composition. His mother, Myra Loos-de Saram had studied piano in Europe. All children received piano lessons from Irene Vanderwall who had qualified at the Royal School of Music in London.[3] Miriam Pieris, whose mother, Lady Hilda Obeyesekere, was also a trained pianist, was interested in Kandyan dance;[3] Rohan also learnt Kandyan traditional drumming.[2]
At the college, Rohan received music instructions from Chaplain Roy Henry Bowyer-Yin who had studied in Cambridge. Yin organised lessons after school, to which Rohan and his brother drove with their father Robert for hours of listening to recordings and discussing with Yin.[3] Martin Hohermann, a Polish refugee who played cello in a jazz band, heard the boy play at a school concert, and gave him cello lessons. Within a year, Rohan played his first public concert, at the Grand Oriental Hotel in 1950 to an audience including Viscount Soulbury and the first prime minister, D. S. Senanayake.[3] Impressed with his progress, his teacher made his mother take him to auditions in Europe.[2][4]
With letters of recommendation from prominent cellists, Sir George Dyson offered him a scholarship the Royal College of Music after an audition, and an audition with Pablo Casals in southern France. A former pupil of Casals, the Catalan cellist Gaspar Cassadó heard the boy play when he toured in South Asia, and agreed to teach him free of charge at his residence in Italy, while Casals accepted him for master classes later.[3]
Berio was so impressed by de Saram's performance of his Il ritorno degli snovidenia that he wrote Sequenza XIV specially for the cellist, published in 2002, incorporating drumming on the body of the cello drawn from de Saram's skills with the Kandyan drum.[7] The work was given its world and numerous national premieres by de Saram who then also made the premiere recording.[8]
De Saram often played in duo with his brother, pianist Druvi de Saram.[2] They played on stage and in recordings, notably Prabandha which John Mayer composed for them.[3] De Saram founded the De Saram Clarinet Trio.[2] He was one of relatively few new music interpreters who also improvised.[10] From roughly 1986 to 1994, he occasionally worked with the UK improvising ensemble AMM, appearing on their recording "The Inexhaustible Document", recorded in 1987. He took part in the 2008 Heidelberg Biennale focused on Neue Musik und Improvisation (New music and improvisation).[7][11]
Recordings
De Saram made numerous recordings, both with the Arditti Quartet and as a soloist. He recorded Antonio Vivaldi's cello sonatas and Bach's Cello Suites. A reviewer of a 2016 set of all suites described his playing as "mature, considered, confident, compelling and revealing", with "a delightful freshness and spontaneity throughout".[12]
De Saram recorded Edmund Rubbra's Soliloquy for cello and orchestra, John Mayer's Ragamalas and Prabhanda, Xenakis' Kottos, Elliott Carter's Figment I and II, and works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Peter Ruzicka, Gelhaar, Pröve and Steinke. His 2011 releases include Harmonic Labyrinth with Preethi de Silva, and the first of two volumes of de Saram in Concert featuring Wigmore Hall performances of Kodaly's Sonata for Solo Cello (his score carries Kodaly's hand-written praise for his performance before the composer in May 1960), together with Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata, in which he is accompanied by his brother Druvi. He recorded Britten's Cello Suites, and a reviewer from Gramophone noted his "scrupulous attention to matters of dynamic gradation and tone colour" and described his interpretation as of "a distinctive character and a powerful dramatic impact" delivering "musical insights".[13] Reviewer Andrew Clements from The Guardian wrote that he offered a brisk approach but never neglected details or subtleties.[14]
Personal life
After de Saram's first marriage was dissolved, he married Rosemary de Saram in 1972.[2] They lived in London from that year.[3] Their daughter Sophia became a doctor; she is also an amateur cellist. Their son Suren is a percussionist, drummer of the Bombay Bicycle Club.[4]
De Saram died from a short illness on 29 September 2024, at the age of 85.[1][2][3]
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