Peni Candra Rini, our guest artistic director for this season, was recently featured in Voice of America Indonesia for the premiere of her composition commissioned by Kronos Quartet. In the associated youtube video, Kronos violinist David Harrington asserts:
When you think about the repertoire of music that has been written for string quartet since about 1770, there’s absolutely nothing like Maduswara…. My hope is that audiences will say “I’ve never heard a string quartet sound like that; I’ve never heard Kronos sound like that. But now…I want to learn more about Peni’s work.”
Rini joined Kronos for Maduswara, singing and playing the rebab…. Rini’s tradition is Javanese music, and Maduswara was an involving evocation of this. Rini’s writing for the quartet kept the traditional rhythms while opening up the textures so that every vocal inflection, bent note, and move from a pentatonic to a Western major scale—and back—had an extra expressive edge.
Photo by Peter McElhinney for Style Weekly
Peni and Kronos recently joined in a panel discussion at the University of Richmond regarding her composition and their process of adapting it. Andy asked her to sing a passage from it, and the effect was wondrous: the members of Kronos, no strangers to awe-inspiring talent, all spoke of being deeply moved by the power of her voice in close proximity, and began to think aloud about how that sensation might change their performance technique, to represent not just the “flotando” (floating, flute-like) timbre but also the deep resonance.
Update: the truly great news following this premiere is that Kronos has commissioned 4 additional compositions from Peni!
Social media aggregator Line Today reposted our video of Jali-Jali, calling it “luar biasa fasih” (extraordinarily fluent). It soared past 100k views in a week!
