Προκόφιεφ με Πέτριν

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

On most Athens State Orchestra nights, Timotheos Gavriilidis-Petrin sits at the head of the cello section, facing the podium like everyone else. On Friday 28 May 2027 at 20:30 he carries his cello to the front lip of the Christos Lambrakis Hall stage and turns around: the orchestra's own solo cellist is the evening's soloist, in the concerto Prokofiev spent his last years rebuilding around a twenty-something Mstislav Rostropovich.

Petrin, born in Thessaloniki in 1994, trained at the Curtis Institute of Music under Peter Wiley and Carter Brey, took a prize at Finland's Paulo International Cello Competition, and since 2021 has toured Europe and Asia with Leonidas Kavakos' Apollon Ensemble — an invitation that followed Kavakos conducting him as soloist with this same orchestra. His debut solo album appeared on GENUIN Classics in 2025. On the podium stands Finnegan Downie Dear, the London-born, Berlin-based conductor who took first prize at the 2020 Mahler Competition in Bamberg from a unanimous jury.

The stalls fill with the KOA's season-ticket core: subscribers who have watched Petrin lead the section for years and now come to hear him step out of it, conservatory cello students tracking his bowings from the upper tiers, and Megaron regulars who treat a Friday at the Lambrakis Hall as a standing appointment.

The setting is the Megaron's main hall, 1,960 seats raked toward a stage backed by a pipe organ, and the vibe is a house orchestra playing at home rather than a touring band passing through. The sound is the evening's real subject: the Sinfonia Concertante keeps the cello working in registers the full orchestra can easily cover, a balance test for soloist and conductor alike. The door is simple — numbered seats, tickets 25, 20 and 15 EUR, 8 EUR concession.

The programme pairs two works that rarely share a night. Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante in E minor, op. 125, is his abandoned 1930s Cello Concerto torn down and rebuilt after he heard the young Rostropovich play it; the new version premiered in Moscow in 1952 with Rostropovich as soloist and Sviatoslav Richter conducting. After the interval, Downie Dear leads Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5 — written in 1903, before atonality, when Schoenberg was still out-Straussing Strauss: Maeterlinck's doomed love triangle told by a huge late-Romantic orchestra in one unbroken span.

If the name Schoenberg reads as a warning label, note that op. 5 predates his twelve-tone system entirely — this is dense, chromatic storytelling, not a theory lesson. If you need an evening of familiar tunes, look elsewhere in the season. But if you want to hear an orchestra promote from within, its principal cellist out front and a Mahler Competition winner on the podium, this is the night built for it.

Presale for the KOA's 2026-27 Megaron season opens Monday 27 July 2026, and ticket holders can claim the 19:30 introductory lecture before the concert. The hall sits directly above Megaro Moussikis metro station.

ΠΡΟΚΟΦΙΕΦ ΜΕ ΠΕΤΡΙΝ puts the section leader where his own section can watch him: alone, out front.