Duo Becchio

Duo Becchio was founded in 2023 by two students of the Castelló Superior Music Conservatory in Spain. Mario Teruel Santapau studies cello with José Enrique Bouché and piano with Juan Carlos Cornelles. He has won numerous national prizes as a soloist and chamber musician and is a member of several youth orchestras. Pianist Óscar Álvarez Peris completed his bachelor’s degree at the Castelló conservatoire, where he studied with Xavier Torres, earning several distinctions. He is currently completing a master’s degree while also teaching and maintaining an active concert career with regular recitals covering a broad repertoire at numerous venues around the Valencian region. The duo’s Ljubljana Festival performance will consist of cello sonatas by three stylistically and aesthetically different composers. Claude Debussy wrote his cello sonata as one of six planned sonatas for different instruments, at a time when his late style was beginning to shift towards the clarity and restraint of neoclassicism. The great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich left a profound mark on the cello repertoire and the reception of cello music in the twentieth century. When Sergei Prokofiev heard him perform in 1949, he was so impressed that he was determined to write a cello sonata for him. The resulting work, written in the period in which the Soviet authorities were accusing Prokofiev of »formalism«, is more conservative than Prokofiev’s »diabolical« early works. Thirteen years later, Dmitry Kabalevsky also composed a cello sonata for Rostropovich, a work full of marked contrasts and grotesque effects.