This autumn the ACF London launches its first lunchtime concert with a special four-hand piano performance by Marialena Fernandes and Ranko Markovic. They will perform the Viennese Valse as ‘danced’ on one piano by four hands. The programme includes works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Rihm among others.
Born in Mumbai, Marialena Fernandes has been since several years a recognized pianist on the international scene. After completing her education in Psychology from the Mumbai University she went on to the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, where she received her Diploma with distinction in Piano and Chamber Music Performance studying with Walter Panhofer and Bruno Seidlhofer. Solo, chamber music and orchestra concert appearances followed and Fernandes is now regularly performing all over the world, including various TV and Radio broadcasts and CD recordings. Her repertoire does not only cover a broad range of classical music but reaches out for the contemporary, unconventional and improvised. Being appointed Professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna she is holding workshops and master classes and serving as Jury member at International Competitions and as Artistic Director and Program Curator in series such as the „Uno, Due, Tre“ Cycle at the Musikverein in Vienna.
Ranko Markovic is the Artistic Director of Konservatorium Wien University. He was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and studied at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, at the Ferenc Liszt Academy in Budapest, at Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in Moscow and in London. His teachers were Peter Lang, Alfons Kontarsky, Ferenc Rados, Yevgeny Malinin and Maria Curcio. He has performed recitals and chamber music concerts in London, Vienna, Salzburg, Moscow and St. Petersburg (Philharmonia) etc. and has recently also played with the Kopelman Quartet in Vienna Musikverein and with the Konservatorium Wien Chamber Music Ensemble in the Poly Theatre in Beijing.
Fernandes and Markovic have performed as a piano duo since 2000. They have had special success with performances of the piano transcriptions of symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, including those in the Museum of Art History (on Mahler’s original piano), in the Arnold Schoenberg Center and the Jewish Museum in Vienna, at the Festival of the Four Cultures in Lodz, in the Austrian Cultural Forum and in the residence of the Austrian Embassy in London, in the ACF in New York, at the University of California in Los Angeles and McGill University in Montreal, in the Kazakh National Music Academy in Astana and at the Con Brio Festival in the NCPA in Mumbai. The duo also took part in the Mahler Symposium at Vienna State Opera on 18 May 2011, the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death. The duo has released two CDs featuring major piano transcriptions: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony arranged by Zemlinsky and Bruckner’s Third as arranged by Mahler.
