On Wednesday 18th September, a cross cultural music-narrative set in the North Indian Punjab of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’ was launched at the Royal Society of Musicians. Released after almost three decades, the recording was made in 1992 by The Classical Recording Company but did not progress to commercial release at the time.
Now a partnership between the Divine Art Recordings Group and Impulse Music Consultants, the recording features artists Bhasker Patel, and virtuoso sitarist Baluji Shrivastav. Shrivastav plays tabla and pakhavaj on the recording, has been awarded the OBE and gained recognition for his work with the British Paraorchestra, alongside a raft of performance collaborations at the highest level.
Since the recording was made the narrator of colourful extracts from Kipling’s ‘Kim’, actor Bhasker Patel, has risen to become a household name as Rishi Sharma on ITV’s Emmerdale.
‘The Roaring Whirl’ is a revelation of West meets East and demonstrates Sarah Rodgers’s skill and innovation in passing her musical ideas across a spectrum of instruments and traditions. The work is a microcosm of story-telling not only by the use of words but also by the structure of the piece which through musical imagery embraces elements of improvisation by which the instrumentalists can spin out the story themselves. The richness and versatility of all the performers in The Roaring Whirl is available to the musical world in a cross cultural work which will now have a very different audience from the one it first encountered in the ground-breaking original performances of the 1990s.
