^{Bernard Kleikamp
2025}

Langendriyan is a genre of dance-opera, developed in the Mangkunegaran Palace in  Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, Indonesia, in the mid-19th century. In Langendriyan, all of the roles are sung and danced by women. The plots come from a cycle of east Javanese stories concerning a hero, Damarwulan, and his defeat of the evil king Ménakjingga.

The music is played by a full Javanese gamelan, and all of the dialogue is sung. Langendriyan is a highly refined form of theatre, which became an artistic specialty of the Mangkunegaran.

This double CD from PAN Records presents three episodes from the Damarwulan Menakjinggo cycle. Each episode was originally issued as a six-record album of 78rpm double-sided discs. The recordings were made by the U.K. record label Columbia in the Mangkunegaran Palace in 1931 and 1932. The Langendriyan episodes are supplemented here with other gamelan recordings made in the Mangkunegaran in 1931-1934. Most of these additional recordings feature sung poems attributed to Mangkunegara IV (reigned 1853-1881) that were collected under the title Sendhon Langenswara. Read more.

Bernard Kleikamp has been a key person in the folk revival of The Netherlands in the mid-1970s and 1980s as an organiser, writer, andinfluencer-avant-la-lettre. He is  an ethnomusicologist and businessman, who studied drama, ethnomusicology, and (Dutch) literature at the University of Amsterdam in the late-1970s. He is president/owner of Pan Records since 1988 and in 1997 he graduated as a music publisher. In 2020 Bernard finished a master's degree in Asian Studies at Leiden University.