2023 03 06 Conte Fantastique
Charming and fantastic tales about passion, death, love and dance inspired great composers to write wonderful pages of symphonic and operatic music, which are performed here in fascinating transcriptions for string quartet and harp, performed by the Athens String Quartet and the harpist Gogo Xagara.
2023 02 20 The life motif
How can a motif come to convey an entire narrative? What aspects of themselves do composers encode into their works? Three works from different eras illustrate three aspects of the motif and its power to mould the form of a musical work.
Sergei Rachmaninoff's 1st string quartet is include in the programme as a tribute to the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Composer.
2023 02 10 About dreams...
"About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time —a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed— these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours."
from Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago
The concert examines great composer's musical footprint at the beginning and the end of XX century, in central and southern Europe as well as in eastern Europe. Skalkottas's and Kodaly's particular musical idiom, including intense elements of traditional music of their origins, is juxtaposed with the Scnittke's and Gubaidulina's groundbreaking musical language, as this is expressed during the 80's.
2023 01 23 Postponed: French music of the interwar period
Can a musical idiom be charming, humorous, light and melodic and yet have depth, substance and a finely-wrought quality at the same time? The answer is yes, and the French music of the interwar period—the works of Poulenc and Milhaud, in particular—proves it many times over.
2023 01 16 Postponed: Beethoven's septet
If you believe that Beethoven’s revolutionary spirit was only evident after a certain point in his career, then it is worth listening to his Septet, a work which achieved fame from the outset and remains hugely popular to this day. Although the work has a lightness to it—indeed, it can feel like a serenade at times—, Beethoven's genius finds a way to experiment with its forms and timbres, to develop its ideas, and to create a sound world of unparalleled beauty.
2022 12 19 Clarinet trio
Unlike Brahms' Trio, which is among that composer's final works, Beethoven's Trio is a youthful work. Both pieces put the velvety timbre of the clarinet to outstanding use, combining it harmoniously with the deep, sensual sound of the cello.
2022 12 12 Tribute to Nino Rota
"Metallon", the prolific brass and percussion ensemble, performs some of Nino Rota's best-loved melodies from movies that have gone down in film history –including The Godfather, The Clowns, Eight and a Half ,and La Strada– conducted by Nikos Haliassas.
2022 12 05 Bass Trip
The concert is entitled “Bass Trip” after the work of that name by Pēteris Vasks, and is indeed a journey, not only in the geographical sense of the word, but also through the compositional idioms of significant composers of the 20th and 21st century who were inspired by the unique timbre of the double bass.
2022 11 21 Children's songs by Mikis Theodorakis
Miki Theodorakis' songs for children were the first the composer wrote, between 1937 and 1945. As he says, most of them were written "in the freezing chill of History—the ordeal of the 1940s—in my early teens". Triantafyllos Batargias has selected a number of these songs, transcribing and arranging them for the Chronos Ensemble, classical guitar, two female voices and a children's choir.
2023 03 27 Literature and Music
Pierre Beaumarchais' theatrical play "the Barber of Seville" or "the Useless Precaution", Nikos Kazantzaki's novel "Alexis Zorbas" and William Shakespeare's "Midnight Summer Dream" are masterpieces of the world's literature that had inspired equally astonishing music to great composers. These musical pages, full of vivacity, humor, lyrism, passion and dancing ambience, are brought to the audience of Piraeus by Lisa Xanthopoulou, conductor and by Stathis Karapanos, flutist.