As part of its Cyprus Artists Series, the Pharos Arts Foundation will present the inaugural concert of the Acamandis Piano Trio – a newly formed trio for piano, violin and cello, comprising three of the most talented and active musicians in Cyprus – on Wednesday in Nicosia.
The Acamandis Piano Trio – Yiannis Georgiou (piano), Sorin Alexandru Horlea (violin) and Jakub Otcenasek (cello) – is the result of its members’ mutual passion for chamber music and their keen interest in the exploration and performance of the neglected and rarely performed repertoire for piano trio. The three musicians comprising the Acamandis Piano Trio are highly esteemed soloists actively pursuing careers in Cyprus and abroad. The Trio’s name is inspired by one of the early names of Cyprus, which is attributed to Theseus’ son Acamandas, who visited Cyprus after the Trojan war to found a city in the Akamas peninsula.
Georgiou attended the Royal College of Music Junior Department. He studied at Trinity College of Music in London and at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, where he graduated with the Aspirant Diploma. He is the only Cypriot Pianist to have received this award. The pianist has performed as a soloist in the UK, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Switzerland and Germany.
Horlea studied at the George Enescu Music High-School and at the Ciprian Porumbescu Music University. In 2000 he was appointed Assistant Concertmaster at the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra. He is currently a member of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra and he has also been working as an associate teacher of the Cyprus Youth Orchestra.
Otcenasek studied at the Prague Conservatory and at the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversitat in Austria. The celloist has appeared in concerts and recitals all over Europe and has made several recordings for Czech Radio and the Czech National Television. Since 2016 he has been living in Cyprus and is Principal Cellist of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra.
Together the musicians will perform a programme of rarely performed first trios of Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Debussy, written while the composers were still students, in their late teens.
Rachmaninov wrote his first Trio Elegiague in G minor at the age of 19. It is a concise, single-movement work not apparently meant to memorialise anyone in particular, even though it was most probably inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, composed ten years earlier in memory of Nikolay Rubinstein.
When Shostakovich completed his First Piano Trio in C minor he was only 17-years-old and madly in love with a girl called Tatyana Glivenko. The first fruit of that love was this passionate, single-movement work, which was originally entitled Poeme. The Trio strongly recalls the influence of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, and it is perhaps the most romantic work Shostakovich ever composed although it clearly reveals several of his more mature traits such as structural complexity, harmonic ambiguity and extreme contrasts between irony, hope and despair.
Debussy was 18-years-old when he composed his Piano Trio in G major. The work was written while the composer spent the summer of 1880 at Villa Oppenheim in Florence as a guest musician of Madame von Meck. For many years the work was thought to be lost or destroyed by the composer. It was never performed during Debussy’s lifetime and it was not published until 1986 after the manuscript was found in 1982 and severe reconstruction had to be made.
Acamandis Piano Trio
The Pharos Arts Foundation presents a live performance by the trio. November 29. The Shoe Factory, Nicosia. 8.30pm. €10/15. Tel: 22-663871
