Janaki String Trio: Debut (LP, Yarlung)

The three members of the Janaki Trio – violinist Serena McKinney, violist Katie Kadarauch and cellist Arnold Choi – found common cause while students at the Colburn Music School in Los Angeles, and the quality of their performances there first won recognition in the 2005 International Coleman Foundation Award. Only a year later the Trio had moved skyward, with New Yorks much-coveted Concert Artists Guild Award. Now, as an inevitable and delightful consequence, they are ready with the first recorded evidence of their high skills – and also, in the breadth of this program, of their awareness of the broad scope of the musical world they are now out to conquer. The short, two-movement String Trio of Krzysztof Penderecki dates from 1991 – later, therefore, than the time of his violent, dramatic heaven-stormers like his opera ‘The Devils’ and the big choral works. Here is Penderecki in a conversational, almost neo-romantic mood. His instruments chat each other up during the agreeable slow movement, and then do so again at a busier pace in the second movement. This charmer of a movement begins as a fugue and gallops congenially toward its end.