THE ROARING WHIRL – SARAH RODGERS (Métier MSV 28592)

A cross-cultural music-narrative set in the North Indian Punjab of Kipling’s ‘Kim’

Launch Event Details

When: Wednesday 18 September, 2019 12:00 to 2.00pm

Where: The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain, 26 Fitzroy Square, London W1T 6BT

A partnership between the Divine Art Recordings Group and Impulse Music Consultants sees the release in September of a recording which was made in 1992 by The Classical Recording Company but did not progress to commercial release at the time due to a career-changing accident which befell the featured artist,clarinettist Geraldine Allen.  A whole roster of exposure for ‘The Roaring Whirl’ had been planned subsequent to a successful premiere at the annual East Midlands festival of new work, The Nottingham NOW Festival.  Appearances at further festivals and on the BBC had to be postponed after Geraldine, who was at the height of her playing career, was involved in a car accident, receiving severe neck injuries. The postponement and subsequent recovery took longer than expected!

Some 27 years later, this fascinating cross cultural work set in the North Indian Punjab of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim’, sub-titled “a music-narrative”, is at last being made available to wider audiences through the release on Divine Art’s contemporary music label, Métier. 

Since the recording was made the narrator of colourful extracts from Kipling’s ‘Kim’, Bhasker Patel, has progressed from being little known as an actor to become a household name as Rishi Sharma on ITV’s Emmerdale.

Likewise, virtuoso sitarist Baluji Shrivastav, who also 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.

Guitarist Tim Walker who performed regularly with The Fires of London for composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle is also featured on the recording and was principal guitarist with the London Sinfonietta as well as performing with many of the leading symphony orchestras in London.

By turns, challenging, intriguing and entertaining, ‘The Roaring Whirl’ is a revelation of West meets East and demonstrates Sarah Rodgers’sskill and inventiveness 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, while full of evocative musical imagery, embraces elements of improvisation by which the instrumentalists can spin out the story themselves.

Against a backdrop of woven musical textures, the clarinet strides and soars, sometimes conversing, other times commanding, with an astounding versatility and dexterity.  The richness and versatility of all the performers in The Roaring Whirl is at last 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.

We are delighted that Geraldine Allen will play an extract from the album: ‘India Awakes’, with Baluji Shrivastav on tabla, narrated by Bhasker Patel.

We hope you will join us to celebrate the launch of this unique album.

To RSVP and for further information please contact: Margaret Skeet