The Reverón Piano Trio’s main goal is to introduce American audiences to underrepresented music from Latin America alongside new works and standard repertoire. Its members, Ana Maria Otamendi, Simón Gollo and Horacio Contreras hold faculty positions at Louisiana State University, New Mexico University, and Lawrence University, respectively. The trio has been in residency at the University of Wisconsin, Dickinson College, Lawrence University, Louisiana State University, and has given many recitals, lectures, and masterclasses in the United States and Aruba. Upcoming projects include their first trio recording produced and distributed globally by OneRPM, a Texas tour, and residencies at various universities in the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
The combined experience of the members of the trio include major solo, chamber, and orchestral collaborations, as well as master classes at some of the most prestigious schools in the world including Juilliard, Michigan, Oberlin, and Bloomington. Moreover, the trio members are musical entrepreneurs that run their own festivals; they have played major roles at Venezuelan El Sistema and other programs that give a social mission to classical music education; scholars that have produced major contributions in the area of Latin American classical music, as well as articles published in journals of geophysics and anthropology; and pedagogues that have published works on major publishing houses and who have presented about teaching and learning at major music conferences. The Reverón trio uses this rich and diverse background to offer a high quality musical and educational experience that at the same time promotes cultural dialogue and understanding through lectures and Q&As. The members of the Reverón Trio want to be part of change in the world, and bring about and nurture the process of awareness of diversity as a very positive component of society and art. Music from different cultures opens a space for dialogue, common ground, and empathy, and fosters dialogue and understanding.
The Trio is named after Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón (1899-1954). Reverón was one of the earliest American modernists, and according to John Elderfield, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York:
“By the time of his death, in 1954, Reverón was beginning to be celebrated in Venezuela both for the radicalism of his early paintings and for the mysteriousness of his late works, and he would soon be recognized as that nation’s greatest early modernist.”
Early in his artistic career, Reverón painted coastal landscapes with monochromatic palettes imitative of the bright white light of the seashore. These highly tactile paintings are unique in early modernism, and seem to anticipate later monochromatic abstract art. By the time Reverón died in 1954, he was touted as both insider and outsider, academically trained but self-developed, the creator of a persona that in the end he was unable to live without. Despite the fact that Reverón is now regarded as a highly influential figure in Latin America, his work is not celebrated outside the borders of Venezuela. Similarly, the music of Latin America is underrepresented, especially in the piano trio literature. It is our wish to enhance multicultural understanding and increase the visibility of Reverón’s work and of Latin American music through the commission of new compositions, performances, masterclasses, and audio recordings.
