ROLL over, Beethoven: Your latest successor has Gwen Stefani (and you) on her iPod, Rachmaninoff in her soul – and attitude to spare.
“I’m not a freak, I’m not a nerd,” says ASCAP award-winner Athena Adamopolous, who turned 20 yesterday. “I write this music because I can’t help it – I need to express it.” Raised in Manhattan – her parents own a custom-furniture factory in Queens – Athena won a toy piano in kindergarten for selling the most magazine subscriptions at PS 6.
She soon found she’d rather “make up stuff rather than play what’s on the page.” She wrote her first song at age 6: an Aminor lament about a pair of missing shoes. She’s since studied composition at Juilliard and Harvard, in London and Paris, all of which inspired her quintet for French horn, violin, viola, cello and piano to be performed tonight by the Festival Chamber Music players at Merkin Hall.
Expect it to be as lyrical as her last prelude for bassoon and piano. (Paging Arnold Schoenberg: “Tonality isn’t exhausted!”) “It’s like a diary,” she says of her newest piece. “Full of confessions, secrets – and joy.”