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Kypros Markou is a graduate of the National Conservatory of Greece, the Royal College of Music in London, and the New England Conservatory in Boston where he earned his graduate degree in Orchestral Conducting. At the Royal College he studied violin with the distinguished Spanish virtuoso Antonio Brosa; later, at Indiana University, he studied with the famed Ruggiero Ricci. He also coached chamber music with the Amadeus Quartet in England, and with Rudolph Kolisch at the New England Conservatory, in Boston. During his studies at New England Conservatory he served as assistant conductor of the NEC Symphony under Gunther Schuller. He has won many awards including conducting fellowships from the Aspen Festival and the American Symphony Orchestra League and a violin fellowship from Tanglewood. In 1978 he was invited to participate in the Cleveland Orchestra's Conductors Symposium under the direction of Maestro Lorin Maazel. Seton Hill University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1989.
As a violinist he began his professional career with the New BBC Orchestra in Bristol, England where in addition to public performances they recorded weekly programs for the BBC under the direction of many distinguished conductors including Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Colin Davis, Walter Susskind, Louis Fremaux and many others. Later he returned to his native country of Cyprus where he played with the Cyprus Radio Orchestra and formed the Ronda String Trio with whom he performed many chamber concerts.
He came to the USA in 1973 and was a member of the Portland, Maine and Springfield, Massachusetts Symphony Orchestras. In 1976 he became a member of the Canton Symphony’s Resident String Quartet with whom he performed hundreds of chamber concerts. After moving to Pittsburgh he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Carnegie Mellon University and became a member of the Pittsburgh Chamber Soloists, a chamber ensemble consisting mostly of leading musicians from the Pittsburgh Symphony. Even though his career has gradually focused on conducting he continues to perform recitals and as soloist on the violin including double concertos with principal players of orchestras such as Westmoreland Symphony in Pennsylvania and the Brevard Symphony in Florida where he served as Music Director or Miami Chamber Orchestra and others where he served as guest conductor.
In addition to his current post as Music Director with the Westmoreland Symphony, Kypros Markou is Professor and Director of Orchestral Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI and Music Director of the Dearborn Symphony Orchestra in Michigan. Since June 2006 he has served on the faculty of the summer program at Cincinnati Conservatory where he will be returning for ACCENT09 in June both as a violin teacher and as a conductor. His many guest conducting engagements include concerts with the Sinfonia Varsovia and the Krakow Philharmonic in Poland, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Concepcion in Chile, the Rochester Philharmonic, Rochester, NY, the Romanian National Radio Symphony, Bucharest, Romania, the National Symphony Orchestra of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and the Slovak State Philharmonic.
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American pianist Channing Yu has appeared as piano soloist with numerous orchestras including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, Dayton Philharmonic, and Orchèstra Nova. He was praised by The Boston Globe for his “imaginative piano work.” Mr. Yu grew up in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where he was a piano student of Hanna Li. He was divisional grand prize winner of the American Music Scholarship Association International Piano Competition.
He is busy as a conductor of orchestras and opera. He is the Music Director of the Mercury Orchestra, which gave its début performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 2008, featuring the acclaimed pianist Albert Kim. He is also Artistic Director and Conductor of the Lowell House Opera (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the oldest opera company in New England, where he has conducted fully stage performances with orchestra of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (2003), Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (2007), Puccini’s Turandot (2008), and Verdi’s Otello (2009). Last season, he conducted the Lowell House Opera Orchestra in the Boston début performance of American soprano Sarah Nicholas Price. He served as guest conductor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in its 2008 production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s baroque opera Les Arts Florissants. He began formal study of conducting at Harvard University with James Yannatos; there he served as assistant conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and conductor of the Toscanini Chamber Orchestra.
As a violinist, he studied with Kypros Markou and Huei-Sheng Kao. He has served as concertmaster of the Westmoreland Youth Symphony Orchestra and as a first violinist in the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra. More recently, he was concertmaster of the Brahms Society Orchestra (Cambridge, MA) and a violinist in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He performs regularly as a member of the string quartet Quartetto Periodico. As a lyric baritone, he has performed in the Boston Opera Collaborative, in the Richard Crittenden Opera Workshop in Boston, and in the Neil Semer Vocal Institute in Coesfeld, Germany. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Elizabeth Main has appeared as cello soloist with orchestras at the Claremont Colleges and in her native Seattle. She is a long-standing member of the Harvard classical music scene. She performed recently as principal cellist of the Lowell House Opera, and has spent many years as principal cellist in the Dudley House Orchestra. She has also played with the Brahms Society Orchestra and in large and small chamber music concerts around Boston. Elizabeth is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University.
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