The Hellenic Centre’s New Year Online Concert with Katerina Mina

This year, due to Covid-19, meeting at the Hellenic Centre is not possible, but an online music celebration is! The prizewinning British Cypriot soprano and pianist, Katerina Mina, will be performing her one-artist operatic programme from the piano! Although we will not cut the Vasilopitta, our traditional New Year’s cake together to see which one of our guests will win the lucky coin there will be a lucky draw to see which one of the event’s attendees will win this year’s special prize!

This special evening’s performance will feature Katerina accompanying herself on the piano, as she performs a selection of popular operatic arias by Handel, Puccini, Verdi & Gershwin, art songs by Bellini, Donizetti, Strauss, Weill & Christou, Cypriot & Israeli traditional songs, as well as film music by Ennio Morricone.

The acclaimed soprano, who began her studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama as a concert pianist and graduated as an opera singer, reconnected with the piano during the coronavirus pandemic, discovering her inner passion for playing the piano while singing opera.

Concert premiers 7pm Saturday 30 January. Watch anytime until 10pm Monday 1 February.

Katerina Mina Biography

A prizewinning British soprano, Katerina Mina commands an operatic repertoire that includes Tosca, Santuzza (Cavalleria rusticana), Giorgetta (Il tabarro) and Leonora (La forza del destino).

Born in Cyprus, she makes her home in London, where she studied voice and piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama before winning prizes at the Julián Gayarre International Singing Competition and Concorso Vocale Internazionale di Musica Sacra.

In 2018 she released her debut album, Angel of Fire, on the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label. With the RPO and conductor Grzegorz Nowak, she performs operatic arias by composers including Verdi, Puccini, Wagner and Beethoven.

Katerina has appeared at such concert venues as London’s Southbank Centre, St John’s Smith Square and St Martin-in-the-Fields (with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra under Marios Papadopoulos), and, around the UK, the Buxton Opera House, De Montfort Hall (Leicester), and, with the RPO, Northampton’s Royal and Derngate Theatre. European engagements have taken her to Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Paris, Moscow, Florence, Athens, Tenerife, Ancona, and Cyprus (notably in concerts with the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra under Esa Heikkilä). She has also toured Japan and appeared with the State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra under Enrique Bátiz.

Her extensive concert repertoire includes the Verdi and Mozart Requiems, Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, Kleine Orgelmesse and Scena di Berenice, Dvořák’s Stabat Mater and Te Deum, Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, songs by Duparc, Tippett’s Five Negro Spirituals from A Child of Our Time, David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus, and ‘symphonic rock’ by Rick Wakeman.

Appearing beside the late Professor Stephen Hawking, she performed music by Alexandros Hahalis at STARMUS 2014, the International Festival of Astronomy, in the Canary Islands, and in 2018 sang numbers by British songwriter Linda Lamon at the inauguration of the First International Day of Light at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.

Katerina Mina is an Ambassador of the UK Friends of Israel Opera and holds the Russian Federation’s medal for peace and friendship. In Spring 2021 she will receive a medal from Ludvig Nobel at the Stockholm Culture Awards.