Gio here! Another international trip that Beo took this year was to Belém, Brazil. This is a particularly special place for me, because it is the hometown of my wife, Nathália Kato, who is a collaborative pianist. Beo was fortunate to get to perform piano quintets with Nathália at the Festival Internacional de Música do Pará (FIMUPA) in Belém. Belém is a beautiful city that sits nearly directly on the equator, and it’s sometimes referred to as the “Amazonia Manhattan.” While not rehearsing and performing, we enjoyed getting to try local exotic fruits and coffee, and taking a boat ride to an island in the Amazon.
Beo and Nathália Kato with composer Luiz Pardal after their performance at the magnificent Igreja de Santo Alexandre
Our concert in Belém on November 8th was in a beautiful church – Igreja de Santo Alexandre. The program opened with Suíte Waldemar by local Belém composer Luiz Pardal, who arranged the piece for piano quintet for us. The piece is composed in three movements, and each movement is based on a different bird found in Brazil. Pardal is a well-known composer in Belém, and we had the opportunity to meet and play the piece for him before our performance. Following Suíte Waldemar, we performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet, which left the audience in stunned silence. After a brief pause, Nathália came back out to join us in Ernst von Dohnányi’s youthful and exciting Piano Quintet in C minor.
We had a great time talking to the audience after the concert, although Nathália was the only one of the five of us who speaks Portuguese, so we are thankful to her for translating all of our conversations, both after the concert, and throughout our Brazil trip.
-Gio
Açaí bowl and fried fish bites. A plethora of tropical fruits grow in Belém including Açaí, which locals pair with tapioca.
Members of Beo would often walk to a local coffee shop in Belém to have an afternoon coffee and get decent wifi while working
Caffeine!
Ryan enjoying a nice stroll.