Reynard Rott goes solo in Jakarta tonight
By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan
JAKARTA (JP): When 21-year-old cellist Reynard Rott made his debut with the Nusantara Chamber Orchestra in March, the audience was almost unanimous in the opinion that Jakartans had a new musical gem in their midst. The resulting buzz was similar to the one that followed the successful debuts of ultra-talented pianist Myrna Setiawan and trumpeter Eric Awuy.
Rott's rendition of Antonin Dvorak's hauntingly beautiful Cello Concerto in B minor, op. 104, was a refined one, and only to be expected given his background.
A student of the cello since the age of seven years, Rott gave his first solo performance with the orchestra two years later. After winning numerous competitions, he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia at the age of 16. Two years later he transferred to Juilliard in New York, where he expanded his solo and chamber music repertoire and completed his bachelor's degree in cello performance under the tutelage of Joel Krosnick.
Rott's particular interest lies in 20th century music, especially the contemporary avant-garde. He has landed him joint projects with some of today's greatest contemporary composers, including Krystof Penderecki and Milton Babbitt, as well as working arrangements with Juilliard to play for visiting composers. He has also premiered over 40 new works with the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.
In performing contemporary music, whose "visceral effects are more pronounced when heard in a live performance", Rott hopes to give the public an insight into ground-breaking musical ideas and theories that inspire modern composers to rethink and redefine instrumental expression and technique.
Armed with this objective, he is now poised to go solo before the Jakarta audience. The performance will take place at the Erasmus Huis tonight at 8 p.m.
The program's opening piece will be a tribute to leading Indonesian composer Trisutji Kamal. Her latest composition, entitled Moods, is as profoundly inspired by Islam as most of her compositions since 1984. Written this year for cello and percussion, it is largely improvisational in nature, blending Western formal schemes, Islamic modes and rhythms, and a pentatonic framework common to the Indonesian musical culture. Kamal's frequent collaborator, Balinese gamelan musician I Ketut Budiyasa, will join Rott on percussion.
The next piece, a slow-moving and meditative composition entitled Yggur, was written by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). Its extensive use of various precisely- notated distortion techniques, such as vibrato, sul ponticello and col legno, testifies to Scelsi's obsession to bestow full worth and expression upon the single sound.
The next two compositions, by Greek Iannis Xenakis (1922- ) and American Leon Kirchner (1918- ), are also based on highly- philosophical musical innovations. While Xenakis' Nomos Alpha is peppered with quarter tones, subtle pitch fluctuations, and harmonics with abnormally high frequencies, Kirchner's For Solo Cello blends a strong vein of Romanticism, expressionism and a highly-chromatic lyricism all his own.
It is worth noting that Kirchner was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, who brought about the most fundamental musical revolution for three centuries -- the abandonment of the orthodox key system -- and whose influence has extended to almost every composer since the 1920s.
The program's final piece, Brian Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study II, is "an astonishing tour-de-force in the cello repertoire," Rott says. Sporting unusual supporting gadgets such as four separate microphones and two delay set-ups, he describes it as a "literally terrifyingly fast and complex piece [which] demands absolute concentration from the audience during the nearly 20 minutes required to perform it."