Costas Fotopoulos plays Scarlatti and Bach's Sixth Partita, then Chopin, his own Hommage à Chopin, Granados, and Agosti's Firebird transcription, at the Hellenic Centre.
Costas Fotopoulos is a Greek pianist and composer who has spent most of his working life in London writing for film. He took a master’s in composition for film, television and multimedia at the Royal College of Music with distinction, on a scholarship, scored Jamie Thraves’s silent feature The Projectionist, reached the final of the Volkswagen score competition at the Berlin film festival in 2007, and worked as an assistant to Trevor Jones. In 2002 he conducted his own music to a reel of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a masterclass at the BAFTA theatre taken by John Madden and Gabriel Yared. A pianist who writes to picture hears programmes as sequences rather than as lists, and this one is built that way.
It opens on 1685, the year Scarlatti and Bach were both born: three of the more inventive Scarlatti sonatas, then the sixth of Bach’s keyboard Partitas, published in 1731, seven movements long and the hardest of the set.
The second half is Chopin — the second of the Op. 62 Nocturnes and the First Ballade — followed by Fotopoulos’s own Hommage à Chopin, two of Granados’s Spanish Dances, and Guido Agosti’s transcription of three movements from Stravinsky’s Firebird. Seven o’clock at the Hellenic Centre, and the month’s one evening there given over entirely to playing. The Hellenic Centre’s autumn runs mostly to talks and conversations.