Evelinos Puzaite homepage - Cosima Piano Quintet

Cosima Piano Quintet

The Cosima Piano Quintet was formed in January 2010 and is an international ensemble featuring musicians from England, Guernsey, Lithuania and Tasmania. ‘Cosima’ in Greek means Order and Beauty, those two important musical qualities which the Quintet aspires to present with commitment and energy.

Cosima’s members are a blend of current students and alumni of The Royal College of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Evelina Puzaite (piano) and Angélique Lihou (Cello) met in Guernsey playing Prokofiev 3^rd piano concerto in 2009 and have gone on to play together in various mediums with a dream of one day starting their own ensemble. Katerina Mitchell (violin) who also plays with the LSO and Philharmonia orchestras, Jenny Lewisohn (Viola) and Algirdas Galdikas (violin), the youngest of the group, have also collaborated with each other throughout their studies.

The piano quintet as a form first arose during the Classical period, when piano concertos were sometimes accompanied by string quartet. However, it was not until Robert Schumann's immediately popular and widely imitated Piano Quintet (1842), that this form solidified. The piano quintets of Franz Berwald, Joachim Raff, Johannes Brahms, César Franck, and Antonín Dvořák fostered the dominance of Schumann's model. In the twentieth-century, notable quintets were written by composers with strong connections to the Romantic idiom, including Gabriel Fauré, Edward Elgar, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Nikolai Medtner.

Piano quintets are still relatively uncommon, and the Cosima Piano Quintet has been established with a view to exploring some of this rarely heard music, bringing it to audiences with their unique brand of Order and Beauty.