About Us

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.

Short Version

Carson Becke and Suren Barry form the two halves of Duo Octavian, a two-piano and piano duet ensemble.  They are personable, energetic performers who love speaking to their audiences, and drawing their listeners into their musical world.  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 created their own two-piano arrangements of Brahms’s 'Ein deutsches Requiem', and Gustav Holst’s 'The Planets', and have given the Canadian premieres of arrangements of music from Gershwin’s 'Porgy and Bess' and Stravinsky’s 'The Firebird' by Dmitri Alexeev.  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 raising audiences’ awareness about sustainability.

Elevator Pitch

Carson Becke and Suren Barry form the two halves of Duo Octavian, a two-piano and piano duet ensemble.  They are personable, energetic performers who love speaking to their audiences, and drawing their listeners into their musical world.  Duo Octavian seeks to expand the piano duo repertoire with their own arrangements, and with arrangements and commissions by other performers and composers.

... and if you were wondering why we are called 'Duo Octavian':

The name ‘Duo Octavian’ is based on our shared musical interests.  Both of us are fascinated by the blurring of the lines between ‘performer’ and ‘composer’, and in musicians who combine those two disciplines into one.  We each wrote doctoral dissertations about musicians of the past who perfectly embodied this idea: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Suren) and Richard Strauss (Carson).  Mozart was the consummate performer/composer, and was known as the greatest improviser of his time.  Richard Strauss was also an accomplished improviser, and admired Mozart above all other composers.  His opera 'Der Rosenkavalier' is, in many ways, a twentieth-century re-working of Mozart’s 'Le Nozze di Figaro': all of the characters in 'Rosenkavalier' have mirror characters in 'Figaro', and many of the plot points and motivations are similar.  Strauss’s character Octavian - the hero of the opera - is based on Mozart’s Cherubino.  We feel that Strauss’s reworking of Mozart’s ideas for a contemporary audience resonates strongly with the kinds of things we represent as a piano duo.  We also liked the reference to the piano’s octaves in the name ‘Octavian’.