The Kopelman Quartet with Elizaveta Kopelman (piano)

Wednesday, 12 March 2008
PASYDY Auditorium, 8:30pm

 

The Pharos Trust presents a concert by the Kopelman Quartet and pianist Elizaveta Kopelman on Wednesday 12 March 2008 at 8.30pm, at the PASYDY Auditorium in Nicosia. The evening’s programme comprises works by Borodin, Shostakovich and Weinberg. The artists will also give an educational concert in Nicosia as part of the Trust’s Music Education Programme, developed in association with the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Founded in 2002, the Kopelman Quartet carries forward a rich inheritance of technical excellence, lyricism, grace and musical integrity. Having regularly worked with musicians and teachers such as David Oistrakh, Boris Belenky, Yuri Yankelevich, Fyodor Druzhinin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich and Natalia Gutman, all four members of the Quartet graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1970s and pursued individual careers for twenty-five years.
 
Mikhail Kopelman, first violin, was the renowned leader of the Borodin Quartet for twenty years, and was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Award and the Concertgebouw Silver Medal of Honour.
Boris Kuschnir, second violin, is a distinguished teacher whose pupils include Julian Rachlin and Nikolai Znaider. Igor Sulyga, viola, played for twenty years with Vladimir Spivakov, in the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra and in his string quartet. As founding members of the Moscow String Quartet, both Boris Kuschnir and Igor Sulyga worked with Dmitri Shostakovich on his late quartets. Mikhail Milman, cello, was for twenty years principal cellist of the Moscow Virtuosi and collaborated frequently with the Borodin Quartet in concerts and recordings. 
 
The common roots and background of the musicians enabled the Kopelman Quartet quickly to grow to maturity, and their Edinburgh Festival concert, just one year after their foundation, received extraordinary reviews, referring to “every hallmark of distinguished musicianship” and “great humanity in the finesse of their playing”.  The internationally acclaimed Quartet has performed in major international venues, including the Musikverein in Vienna, the Dom Muziki in Moscow, the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and the Wigmore Hall and appeared in festivals such as, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Valladolid Festival, the Zurich Festival and the Ravinia Festival in the United States. The Kopelman Quartet has collaborated with a number of renowned artists, including Elisabeth Leonskaja, Mischa Maisky and Julian Rachlin.
 
Two recordings by the Kopelman Quartet were released in 2006: on Nimbus Records, Prokofiev’s Second String Quartet and Shostakovich’s  7th  and 3rd; and on Wigmore Live, Tchaikovsky’s Third String Quartet and Schubert’s String Quartet D810, Death and the Maiden.

Born in Moscow in 1974, Elizaveta Kopelman studied at the Centeral School of Music with Dina Parachina and with Arnaldo Cohen at the Royal northern College of Music in Manchester, where she won numerous prizes and awards. In 1995, Elizaveta was selected for representation by the Young Concert Artist Trust in London. She has appeared as a soloist throughout the UK, Europe, USA and South America including debut recitals and concerti at the Purcell Room, Harewood House, Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Royal Opera House Linbury Studio Theatre, Bridgewater Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.  Her chamber music collaborations include violinists Priya Mitchell, Lucy Gould and Peter Krysa, violist Jeanne Mallow, cellists David Geber and Julia Lichten, the Leopold String Trio, Ying Quartet, Jupiter Chamber Players, and members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. She performs regularly with her father, Mikhail Kopelman.

Elizaveta Kopelman has appeared at such festivals as the Mozarteum Argentino, Flanders, Mecklenburgh, Summit and Cratfield where in 2004 she performed Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues. She has also closely collaborated with the London Chamber Orchestra, the London Concert Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Norfolk Symphony Orchestra, the Guildford Philharmonic and the New York Chamber Symphony at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. She has given live broadcasts for both BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM, appeared on Anglia TV and recorded for the Naxos label. 

 PROGRAMME:

Alexander Borodin (1833 – 1887)

String Quartet No. 2 (1881)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975)

String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor (Op. 110)

INTERVAL

Moisey Weinberg (1919 – 1996)

Piano Quintet, Op. 18 (1944)

Ticket Prices:

Adults: €20

Friends and Supporters of the Pharos Trust : €17

Concessions : €12

Tickets can be purchased from:

The Pharos Trust (22 663 871),

Athalassas Music Centre (22 510 547),

Moufflon bookshop (22 665 155),

Soloneion bookshop (22 666 799) and

Travelorama (22 452 945)