Tribute to Iannis Xenakis | Complete works for piano solo

The production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org] to enhance the Greek National Opera’s artistic outreach.

The Greek National Opera Alternative Stage participates in the celebration of the centenary of the birth of the great 20th-century music innovator Iannis Xenakis with an extensive programme of concerts and performances covering the whole spectrum from his groundbreaking solo works to his stage works. The four parts of the Tribute to Iannis Xenakis will be presented on the GNO Alternative Stage at the SNFCC on 7, 8, 20, 22, 26 May 2022.

Distinguished contemporary music specialist Stefanos Thomopoulos returns to the GNO Alternative Stage after his latest appearances in Mark Monnet’s ballet-opera Bibilolo, with an ambitious programme including Xenakis’ complete solo piano works.

A body of works that marked the soloistic musical output of the second half of the 20^th century radically resetting, both in an “athletic” and in an intellectual regard, the bar high for those rare performers who dare measure themselves against it, Xenakis’ music for solo piano includes milestone-works of the post-war avant-garde, like Erma (1960-1961, written for Japanese musician Yuji Takahashi), a masterpiece of the period in which Xenakis strongly experimented with the mathematical standardisation of his music, and known for its characteristic “sonic nebula”; the shockingly complex Euryali (1973), a work whose name means “big sea” and where the composer introduces the new technique of his tree-reminding  shrubby, branching lines, conquering such high level of difficulty that (according to French pianist Marie-Françoise Bucquet, to whom the work is dedicated) “one can only convey 80 to 90% per cent of the score”; the work Mists (1981, written for Australian musician Roger Woodward), famous for its notation novelties, where linearity engages in a fiery dialogue with the sonic nebula and silences; and the masterly miniature-etude on scales à r. (1987), an unadorned and translucid tribute to Maurice Ravel.