Duo Octavian

Carson Becke and Suren Barry form the two halves of Duo Octavian, a two-piano  and piano duet ensemble. Personable, energetic performers, Duo Octavian loves  speaking to their audiences, and drawing their listeners into their musical world: if  you come to a Duo Octavian show, you will almost certainly hear some music that  you’ve never heard before, or hear music that you already know presented in a new  

way. Carson and Suren both grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and were frequent  adversaries in local music competitions as kids, often tying for second place behind  their more talented contemporaries. After going their separate ways for post secondary education, they reconnected in their early twenties to perform together  for the first time. They found that they had much common musical ground,  including a desire to place creativity at the center of their musical process. They  decided to bury the hatchet of their childhood rivalry and founded Duo Octavian in  2016.  

Duo Octavian seeks to expand the piano duo repertoire with their own  arrangements, and with arrangements and commissions by other performers and  composers. They have co-authored new two-piano transcriptions of Johannes  Brahms’ ‘Ein deutsches Requiem’, premiered with the Ewashko Singers in 2019, and  Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’. Their premiere of The Planets was part of an outdoor  late-night concert in August 2021, at the peak of the Perseid Meteor Showers. The  concert – part of the Pontiac Enchanté concert series – was presented in association  with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and was intended to spread  awareness about the importance of dark sky preservation. The duo has presented  the Canadian premieres of two arrangements by Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev,  including a concert suite from George Gershwin’s opera ‘Porgy and Bess’, and  Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’. They have also championed arrangements by the early  twentieth-century pianist Harold Bauer, who wrote incredibly imaginative – but  largely forgotten – arrangements of music by Bach, Schubert, and others for two  pianos. 

Carson and Suren are both passionate about the natural world, and they believe  that the performing arts industry has an important role to play in the global fight  against climate change. They are committed to finding creative ways of adapting  their activities as a duo to be more environmentally sustainable, and to raise  audiences’ awareness about sustainability.