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janaki string trio |
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Arnold Choi - cello Serena McKinney - violin Katie Kadarauch - viola
Winner, 2006 Concert Artists Guild International Competition Winner, 2005 Annual Coleman Chamber Music Competition
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Among the swiftest rising young chamber ensembles today, the Janaki String Trio brings together three virtuoso musicians whose passion and commitment have captivated both audiences and presenters alike. Founded at The Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles in early 2005, the group soon won the 59th Annual Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and in March 2006, the threesome came to national attention as the first string trio ever to win the Concert Artists Guild International Competition. The Trio also garnered the inaugural BMI Foundation Commission Prize, awarded by CAG at the 2006 Competition. The Janaki Trio makes its New York recital debut on the CAG Series at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in January 2007, in addition to numerous other performance prize engagements across North America during the 2006-07 season. Selected to participate in Canada’s Banff Music Festival in June 2006, this honor follows an exciting 2005-06 season, highlighted by performances on such series as LACMA’s Sundays Live (broadcast on Los Angeles’s primary classical music station, KMozart), Lagerstrom Chamber Music at Caltech, South Bay Chamber Music Society and the Music Guild Chamber Music Series. On the recording front, the Trio’s debut CD was released in summer 2006 on Yarlung Records, featuring works by Beethoven, Penderecki, and Los Angeles-based composer, Jason Barabba, and future projects include the Vanhal Quartets for Flute and Strings, with flutist Uwe Grodd, for the Naxos label. The ensemble takes its name from the Sanskrit word Janaki (YAHN-uh-kye), which symbolizes self-realization — the underpinning artistic and spiritual ideal entwining composer, musician and listener. Indeed, the Trio makes a unique connection with its audiences, not only with the standard works of the repertory, but also with rarely heard masterworks, such as Penderecki’s gripping String Trio, as well as provocative new pieces. The audience’s consistent enthusiasm for this adventurous programming has convinced the Trio that listeners are open to new music when it is presented in an exciting way. This has strengthened the ensemble’s commitment to expand the string trio repertoire by commissioning new works from both celebrated and emerging composers, and BMI Commissioning Prize from the CAG competition will result in a new composition to be premiered in 2007. Each member of the Janaki Trio has a strong commitment to music education and has organized and performed in outreach concerts across the United States and Canada. In 2006-07, the Janaki Trio works with the Da Camera Society in promoting music education in elementary schools, hospitals, retirement communities and other community venues throughout the Los Angeles area. Individually, the members of the Janaki Trio have performed at the Marlboro, Tanglewood, Yellow Barn, Aspen, Great Lakes, and Schleswig-Holstein music festivals and have performed with such eminent musicians as David Soyer, Ronald Leonard, Jaime Laredo, and Mitsuko Uchida. Members of the Trio have studied with Kim Kashkashian, Isodore Cohen, Sylvia Rosenberg, and the Guarneri, Juilliard, Cleveland, Orion, and Takacs Quartets. Currently, the Trio studies individually and collectively with Robert Lipsett, and with Paul Coletti and Ronald Leonard, who also serve as the Trio’s coaches at The Colburn School. Serena McKinney performs on a Camillus Camilli violin (circa 1742) on loan to her from the Mandell Collection of Southern California; Katie Kadarauch performs on a Giovanni Grancino viola (circa 1695) on loan to her from the Mandell Collection of Southern California; and Arnold Choi performs on a Carlo Tononi cello (circa 1725) on loan to him from an Anonymous Donor
January 18, 2007 By Allan Kozinn Surely some conspiracy theorist can explain what unnatural sequence of events prevented the string trio from becoming one of the most frequently heard ensembles, rather than the oddity it is. The configuration - violin, viola and cello - is perfectly balanced and symmetrical, its seamless range from soprano to bass untroubled by a top-thickening second fiddle or the distraction of a piano. And you'd think string players would form trios by the dozen just to have Mozart's E-flat Divertimento in their active repertory. Yet composers and players have always flocked instead to string quartets, which are plentiful, while trios are comparatively few. The Janaki String Trio is making the most of an uncrowded field. Its musicians joined forces two years ago in Los Angeles and have won the Coleman Chamber Music Competition and the Concert Artists Guild International Competition. The guild sponsored the trio's New York debut concert at Weill Recital Hall on Tuesday evening. Its repertory tilts toward the contemporary. As an opening salvo the group played Krzysztof Penderecki's String Trio (1991), in which harsh, insistent full-ensemble blasts separate agitated but singing solo lines from each of the players. Eventually the brashness of the score's first pages melts, but lyrical beauty emerges only tentatively, in the violin line, before the piece wends its way back to the grittiness of the opening. That rough-edged quality is clearly a central part of the musicians' sound, and it turned up, in varying degrees, in everything they played. But it isn't all they do. Andrew Norman's "Alabaster Rounds," composed for the trio, was inspired by listening to monks chanting at a basilica in Rome at daybreak, and it requires the ensemble to convey a sense of a shifting, mysterious atmosphere. At first the trio plays a consonant drone, with sustained cello and quickly undulating violin and viola figures; but fleeting dissonances enliven the texture, which gradually expands in dynamics and melodic breadth. Near the end a solo viola line offers a florid evocation of plainchant. The playing, more gentle than in the Penderecki, nevertheless had the kind of drive that gives even a slowly unfolding work like Mr. Norman's an irresistible electricity. The players - Serena McKinney, violinist; Katie Kadarauch, violist; and Arnold Choi, cellist - were as fresh and energetic in Beethoven's Trio in G (Op. 9, No. 1). They closed their program with an earthy, magnificently polished account of Dohnanyi's Serenade in C (Op. 10).
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