A.R. Rahman has admitted he made very real mistakes and was less than first-class in his newfound alternative career as India’s first cross-over musical composer to the West and one who dared to take white audiences on an unlikely journey from Beethoven to Bollywood.
“I have written notes about what I have to fix (in myself), more lessons in conducting, one can never stop learning,” said Rahman humbly after he was panned for presuming to conduct a landmark concert for one of Europe’s finest, oldest and most venerable orchestras.
Rahman’s comments to TNN come three days after he conducted a concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). It was the first time anywhere in the world that popular Hindi song lists were played by a full 75-piece western symphonic orchestra and it was thought to have broken one of the biggest taboos in the West’s largely “male and pale”, classical musical heritage. Early on Wednesday, Rahman said the unfamiliar experience was “liberating, no clip tracks, no computers running”.
With his trademark modesty, he admitted the pungent criticism of his performance from British classical music reviewers was accurate, “just what I expected (partly) because it is such a reputed thing”. This is the first time Rahman has been criticized roundly in a Britain has been impressed by his successful London theatrical collaboration, Bombay Dreams, with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In a mea culpa, Rahman admitted the concert began ignominiously when he was “trying to start one piece” but couldn’t and had to rev the orchestra up a second time. The British reviews damned Rahman’s first foray into conducting a western orchestra as “wooden…(a potential) disaster”. Somewhat savagely they criticized the CBSO, which is based in Birmingham aka `Little Punjab’, for putting on Rahman and “demeaning …the musical talents of one of Britain’s finest orchestras”.
One review significantly waxed more eloquent about the “free samosas” laid on by the organizers rather than Rahman’s music and conducting. But Rahman, who said he was unfazed by the criticism, insisted he planned to carry on with conducting western orchestras after further training at workshops. “The ice has been broken. The piece I am composing for November will be written especially for an orchestra. This was just my background pieces”.
Somewhat defensively, he said he had offered the classical concert’s sell-out, unusually Asian audience a health warning at the outset. “I said this might sound weird”. In a sign that the man often billed as the “Mozart of Madras” is keen to bring an Indian perspective to the last Western stronghold – its classical musical heritage – Rahman said the concert was “just a start for me to go into the mainstream”.
The initial announcement of Rahman’s orchestral foray had surprised Western classical music aficionados. At the CBSO concert, Rahman’s baton was heavy with the weight of history because its very first concert was conducted by the great composer Sir Edward Elgar.
