Music
Press
As creative as Laurie, as feminine as Tori, as playful as the Cocorosies, here is the pianist from Padova who has bewitched David Byrne of the Talking Heads. - JAM (November 09)
They tried to define her in every way, troubling the names of Laurie Anderson and Tori Amos, Regina Spektor and the progressive...Petrina is without doubt among the most original and deliciously visionary artists of these last years. - BLOW UP (June 09)
She is a genius. Gifted with a very high artistic richness, her destabilizing album in doma (DBR/Egea) is able to combine with a pop-rock and avant-garde playful spirit. Much experience behind her back, a lot of ideas to illuminate the present and the future. - IL MUCCHIO (August 09)
Her voice is one crystalline traveller of the sounds, that Björk could appreciate. First you can hear certain episodes of Pj Harvey's style. Then some lunges that seem sung "without a net", as a Patti Smith, miraculously refined and feminine, could do. Finally, certain voltages dear to great ladies of the italian songwriting. But each approach is equivalent to cage Petrina and her music into diagrams that in doma grasps, turning again and breaking into small small pieces, returning the listener to a sparkling sound-mixing of communicating styles, hasty changes of direction, masterstrokes and calls to the past through modern sounds. - ALL ABOUT JAZZ (May 09)
This is the second Italian playlist I’ve done — though the last one was years ago. Again I’ve focused on artists who, to me, couldn’t have come from anywhere else. - DAVID BYRNE (April 10)
Curious, omnivorous, with her aerials well tuned in to all that surrounds her, a special relationship with her voice and her body. - ALL ABOUT JAZZ (April 10)
This month is tunes from CDs that I've purchased and downloaded over the last few months. It's another eclectic selection, and not much holds it all together except that most of it is in English. Some great stuff... - DAVID BYRNE (October 09)
An authentic jewel more than a musical promise, a wonderful surprise in a moment in which the discography proposes only the easiest thing to sell, in a time in which the music research, son of the inventiveness, is left to his own devices, you can still bumb into a true talent, and when it happens it is an authentic rare emotion. - MUSICOMANI.IT (February 10)
In the style of a tightrope walker, she swings between Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson and surrealistic curtains. - IL CORRIERE DELLA SERA (January 10)
How is possible that an artist so eclectic and innovator can debut (in a record-making) at the height of her musical maturity (and what's more, producing herself), is an enigma...No doubts: one of the best releses of 2009. - WONDEROUS STORIES (October 09)
Pop in the sense of pop art, ironic overtones, catching us unaware, resulting from extraordinary workmanship, between rock, vintage and futurism. Vote: immense. - IL MANIFESTO (September 09)
IN DOMA demonstrates her eclectism and also an unusual, exuberant musical talent which delicately digs solid roots, in a fertile ground formed by her classical background (Debora is an excellent pianist). in doma is a work in which, with a Zappa-like attitude, different genres and moods, from jazz to rock, punk, and beyond, live together. - ROCKERILLA (June 09)
She has arrived to break up the dreams of unaware "song architects", like those of the avant-garde visionairies: Petrina knits twelve tracks that risk to bring home the whole bank...who has known Debora Petrina as a remarkable contemporary pianist will find her also as an intriguing songwriter who has elusive influences...in doma in this way longs to become the mysterious fetish of this first part of 2009, too much impertinent to be sexy, too sensual to not give us the impression that she's laughing behind the backs of everyone who's thinking to have understood her secret. Between jazz and pop, between toys and voices like Kate Bush, Tori Amos and prog temptations, much cultured weirdness and coolness radical-spritz. 8 on 10 - BLOW UP (May 09)
Songwriting? Not only: new music which, with courage, surfaces transgenically between moods and genres, musical languages, Klang and cultured/popular quotations, from La Monte Young to Gino Paoli and to the coastal suggestions of the 60s...A memorable album. 8 on 10 - ROCKERILLA (May 09)
She sings in Italian, Spanish, French, English and Hungarian. At the same time, in her music you can find varied and kaleidoscopic influences: classical, jazz, drum'n'bass, blues, progressive, pop, the Nick Cave of the murder ballads. - ROCKIT (May 09)
Debora Petrina is an Italian musical prodigy with a multitude of talents, ranging from multi-instrumentalism (with a predilection for keyboards and piano) to experimental singing, dance and performance, avant-garde of gestures, imagination in songwriting. - EMOZIONI (September 09)
While the wrecks of what was the Italian record industry strive to impose provincial non-entities at high prices, authors like Debora Petrina dialogue confidently with the music of the world. - RARO (September 09)
There is a fascinating feminine figure who wanders among pianos, toy pianos and organettas...Petrina's voice wraps up in curious and unusual melodies, cleverly embroidered with keyboards or Fender Rhodes, and she sings of anonymous text messages, adventures in swimming pool, pink bikinis, asteroids: like an eccentric Tori Amos who meets an amused and energetic Cristina Donà. But the comparisons are not sufficient to describe her music, each piece is declined in a different and unexpected way. - JAM (May 09)
Tightrope walking pastiche built on changes of atmospheres and (most of all) on a thousand nuances of a technical and chameleon-like singing which, intoning curious and surrealistic lyrics, passes from Italian to English and to Spanish. Unpredictable, playful and a bit pleased of himself, in doma is, in his (no) genre, a little masterpiece of inspiration, taste and courage. - IL MUCCHIO (June 09)
IN DOMA is a self-produced, home-made, personal business card of this butterfly of the notes, who depicts an impression of great freedom above the musical semantics. - ITALIAN EMBASSY (May 09)
Written, sung, played and producted by Petrina, it is and it will remain one of the highest results of the italian pop art. It is, obviously, a deviated but cultured one, frivolous but ethic, measured but shattering. Most of all it makes a pair with an inner universe, already half-exploded in his big bang, and with a receptacle of creative collisions mysteriously commanded. - ONDAROCK (June 09)
What happens when mad creativity meets an eclectic talent? probably a big "boom!" takes place, considering the mass of the two factors or, better, if the chosen road is the musical one, an album like Petrina's one is born. - LIVEROCK (June 09)
Discography
Still working on that hot first release.
Photos
Bio
PETRINA - singer, pianist and keyboardist, songwriter, composer and arranger, is one of the revelations of the independent Italian music scene.
Her debut album, in doma, distributed worldwide by Egea, features guests such as Elliott Sharp, Emir Bijukic, Amy Kohn, and Ascanio Celestini, and it is already provoking the enthusiasm of of all the specialized press and radio programs in Italy, still after one year from the release.
David Byrne put her songs in his playlists of September and October 2009.
In April 2010 Petrina is present in a new playlist, named Italia, beside Paolo Conte, Carmen Consoli and Marisa Sannia.
Petrina has just received the Indie-Pop Revelation Award during the MEI 2009 (Meeting of Independent Labels); the prize has been awarded by a jury of under 25.
Always in 2009 RaiRadio1 invited her for the festival Demo d’Autore as one of the 10 best Italian authors among the 1000 selected by the program Demo.
Even if in doma represents something entirely new in the Italian musical panorama, Petrina already has on her hands the victory of the Premio Ciampi 2007 for songwriting, and a row of collaborations and concerts all over the world.
In 2008 she was invited by Elliott Sharp to The Stone, John Zorn's club in New York City, where she performed in duo with drummer Mike Sarin.
In 2007 Petrina appeared in one of the most important clubs in S.Francisco, the Café du Nord, sharing the bill with Amy X Neuburg and Emily Bezar.
On the same occasion she performed contemporary music premieres and original music at Mills College (Oakland), temple of the West Coast avant-garde in the 60s.
Invited to the Roldán Theatre, in La Havana, by the Instituto Cubano de la Música, Petrina performed a program of 19th century cuban compositions, all reinvented and rearranged. On that occasion she gave an interview for the historical Radio Progreso.
She has also been invited to the Conway Hall in London, to play premieres by Morton Feldman. In that occasion she was also choreographer and dancer, while playing the piano.
In Italy she has performed in diverse venues, from classical and contemporary to avant-garde, to jazz, to rock stages, such as the Teatro La Fenice (with a premiere by Bruno Maderna), the Fondazione Cini in Venice (with premieres by Nino Rota), the avant-garde festival The Piano Hour Series of the Concentus Musicus, in Florence, as composer and improviser at the prepared piano, the Just Like A Woman Festival, that calls from all the world the most important female singers.
She has made recording premieres of music by Morton Feldman for an independent American label (Early and Unknown Piano Pieces, OgreOgress) and took part in the A Call for Silence curated by Nicolas Collins for the Sonic Arts Network (UK).
She is often hosted at several national radio and TV networks, where she also plays in live concerts: RaiRadio3, RaiRadio1, and Tg2.
Petrina has also been invited to play at RSI (Italian Switzerland Radio), and at the National Hungarian Radio.
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