Roots: 21st Century Greek Music for Guitar
Petros KLAMPANIS (b.1981)
Ariadne’s Duality (2020) [5:40]
Philippos TSALAHOURIS (b. 1969)
Haiku, Op 109 (2019) [11:24]
Iason MAROULIS (b. 1999)
Allegory of the Tragic Hero (2020) [11:17]
Theodore ANTONIOU (1935-2018)
Hommage (2007) [28:26]
Dimitris Soukaras (guitar)
Lotte Betts-Dean (mezzo-soprano)
L’Anima String Quartet & Ensemble, Audentia Ensemble/Ryan Blair
All world premiere recordings.
rec. October 2020, St. Mark’s Church, Paddington, London; October, 2020, Sierra Studios, Athens.
Sung texts and translations included.
NAXOS 8579115 [56:53]
To an unwary online buyer, the title of this CD might suggest that it consists of compositions for unaccompanied guitar. In fact, only one of the four works recorded here by Dimitris Soukaras is for solo guitar – the first, Ariadne’s Duality by Petros Klampanis; Haiku, by Philippos Tsalahouris is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and guitar, while Iason Maroulis’ Allegory of the Tragic Hero is scored for guitar, string quartet, accordion and percussion. The work which closes the disc, Hommage by Theodore Antoniou is for guitar and string orchestra.
Born in Corinth, the guitarist Dimitris Soukaras is currently based in London. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Michael Levin, completing the Advanced Diploma and an M.A.(with Distinction). Prior to his studies in London, he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Music (with Distinction) at the Ionian University in Corfu, where one of his teachers was Costas Cotsiolis, among the leading Greek guitarists. The booklet for this Naxos CD tells us that he is currently “a PhD candidate at the University of Surrey”.
I have heard only one previous recording by Dimitris Soukaras. That was From Dawn to Dusk, issued by the dotguitar.it to mark the occasion of Soukaras being awarded First Prize in the 24th International Guitar Festival held at Mottola in Italy (2018). That CD introduced Soukaras playing pieces by Dowland, Britten and Leo Brouwer, alongside William Walton’s Five Bagatelles – all mainstream repertoire for modern classical guitarists. This new CD finds Soukaras exploring music with which he has, in some senses at least, a more personal relationship. In his ‘Artist foreword’ which opens the CD booklet here, Soukaras writes “The impetus behind this project came from my aspiration for new guitar repertoire that would reflect elements of Greek history and musical culture, such as the language, rhythm and melodies. I wanted to record an album that would be a reference to the many musical genres of Greece that have influenced me so far in my life. It was also an opportunity to invite some of Greece’s leading composers to write for the guitar for the first time.”
The first piece here is by Petros Klampanis, primarily known, to me at least, as a double bass player and composer/arranger in the world of contemporary jazz, who divides his time between his native Greece (he grew up on the island of Zakynthos) and New York, and I remember listening, with considerable interest and delight, to a 2019 CD, Irrationalities (issued by Enja), by a group he leads, Contextual Trio, made up – in addition to Klampanis, of pianist Kristjan Randalu and drummer/percussionist Bodek Janka. The music on the album is a distinctive and successful take on the piano trio, which fuses seamlessly the written and the improvised in a thoroughly post-bop idiom. In an interview (“Petros Klampanis’s ‘Araiadne’s Duality’ -interview with the composer”) which can be found on YouTube, Klampanis tells us that he has little knowledge of the classical guitar repertoire and that his composition owes more to world music (especially flamenco) and jazz than to the classical tradition. He also says that in preparing the piece he worked in close collaboration with Dimitris Soukaras.
In the several stories told about Ariadne she would seem to embody a number of dualities: as the one who makes it possible for Theseus to escape from the minotaur in the labyrinth, she is a type of the woman who saves the man she loves. When, later, she is deserted by Theseus on Naxos she is, rather, a type of the woman abandoned by the man she loves. Her subsequent relationship with Dionysus eventually leads to her being deified, so that she also embodies the duality of human and divine. It would be foolish to expect a short (less than ten minutes) work for solo guitar to hint at, let alone articulate, all these dualities. But Klampanis’s composition, as played by Dimitris Soukaras, in its alternations between passion and tenderness and its contrasts of tempo and dynamics certainly has a duality of effect which is by no means inappropriate.
In Haiku, with both words and music by Philippos Tsalahouris, Dimitris Soukaras is joined by the mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean. The text of Haiku is made up of 9 short poems, which don’t seem (since I have no knowledge of modern Greek my comments are tentative) to have much in common with the original Japanese form, save their brevity. The text begins in rain and darkness, relieved only by a mention of “luminous” water; it moves, gradually, through “stars falling slowly” and “White roses/ mauve flowers/ Kisses within kisses” to end thus, in the final poem (the translator who provided the English translations of Tsalahouris’ poems is not named):
Angel is standing
Shining white sheet waiting
Candle blowing out
Angel is standing.
[all the poems are unpunctuated].
The music, in which the contributions of vocalist and guitar are so closely integrated that it seems meaningless to speak of ‘singer’ and ‘accompanist’, moves from the natural scene at the beginning to the closing sacramental (perhaps even ‘funereal’) setting with an intense, ineluctably dramatic trajectory. In his brief note on Haiku in the CD booklet, Philippos Tsalahouris writes “I have created two independent, parallel monologues that, when they come together, create a very special poetic moment,” Although I see what Tsalahouris means, in my experience of listening to Haiku I have found voice and guitar more comprehensively unified than he seems to claim in this statement.
Perhaps because I already knew that Dimitris Soukaris was a fine guitarist, it was the powerful (yet subtle and precisely controlled) performance by mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean that made the greater impression on me during my first few hearings of Haiku. Betts-Dean was born and brought up in Australia – she is the daughter of Brett Dean, the well-respected composer, violist and conductor – but has lived in London since 2014; she graduated from the Royal Academy in 2016, with an MA (with Distinction). She has the kind of voice (in which one seems to sense her whole personality) which immediately grips one’s attention and doesn’t readily release it. Though she has won a number of prizes during her time in the UK (such as the Young Artist Platform at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2019 and both the Overseas Prize and the Audrey Strange Memorial Prize of the Over-Seas League Competition in 2020) I haven’t been lucky enough to hear her sing live.
In Haiku she communicates both text and music with passionate urgency, creating a ‘character’ – who is nameless – who is compelled to express powerful emotions. In the very brief No.3 in the sequence, for example, there is a remarkable veracity to the completeness with which she articulates both musical line and poetic text – “Darkness falling deeply/ Monotonous melody/ Is filling the earth”. Emotionally and intellectually, she seems to ‘possess’ both music and text (and their interrelationship) so completely that hearing this brief song (it is only just over thirty seconds long) one feels as though a fictional inner life has been revealed with astonishing clarity and directness.
Up to this point on Roots, we have heard Dimitris Soukaras as a soloist (in Ariadne’s Duality) and partnering a singer (in Haiku). In Iason Maroulis’s Allegory of the Tragic Hero we hear him in what is, in effect, a small-scale concerto – small-scale insofar as the ‘orchestral’ role is performed by just six instrumentalists and also because it consists of a single movement lasting only just over eleven minutes. One common conception of the concerto (especially those of the Romantic era) sees it as, in some sense, a ‘struggle’ or ‘contest’ between the soloist and the larger ensemble. The soloist in such a concerto is often thought of as the protagonist of the work, rather as the major character in a Greek play was described as its protagonist. The word at the core of ‘protagonist’, agon means, in Classical Greek, ‘struggle’ or ‘conflict’. It is not then difficult to see at least a loose analogy between post baroque concerto form and Greek tragedy – and this would be both easier and more natural for someone (like Iason Maroulis) brought up in Greek culture (though he is now based in London), to do. That he had such an analogy in mind is made explicit both in the title he gave to this composition and what he says by way of introduction to it, in his short booklet note: “In Allegory of the Tragic Hero, we hear a solo guitar trying to establish itself as the protagonist of the piece while ‘struggling’ against the rest of the ensemble, which has the greater dynamic range and richness of sound. The conflict between the soloist and the ensemble is used to create a connection to ancient Greek tragic heroes whose struggles are the result of a conflict with the divine laws or of fate.”
Maroulis’ Allegory of the Tragic Hero sets the guitar against a small ensemble made up of a string quartet plus an accordionist and a percussionist; this recording was made in Athens, with the strings being those of the Greek quartet L’Anima – I presume that the accordionist and percussionist – whose names are not provided – are also Greek. As befits a ‘concerto’, the guitar of Dimitris Soukaras is foregrounded throughout most of the eleven and a quarter minutes that the performance lasts. This piece operates at some considerable distance from the musical language normally associated with the classical guitar; Soukaras is playing an electric guitar and some passages involve the plentiful use of distortion, the bending of notes and pinch harmonics. The abrasiveness of the guitar sound may put off some listeners, but it seems to me wholly appropriate to the work’s subject – the suffering of the tragic hero.
From the opening minutes of Allegory the confidence (hubris?) of the guitar, as it tries to assert itself, is challenged by some high-pitched comments in the strings and some ominous percussive blows. As the music develops it articulates a sense of struggle and even, in the guitar part, an increasing feeling of suffering (our word ‘agony’ comes from the same Greek root, agon, as ‘protagonist’). The guitar is not easily cowed by the ensemble’s ‘opposition’, but, after summoning up some assertive statements in the face of the ensemble’s increasing dominance, it eventually subsides into silence (the tragic hero’s ‘death’). This is a powerful piece, though it won’t be to all tastes.
The sound-world of Theodore Antoniou’s Hommage is altogether less challenging and more readily accessible. Antoniou was a significant figure as composer, conductor and teacher. Born in Athens, his first advanced studies were at the National Conservatory in the Greek capital. Thereafter he spent much of his life outside Greece, without ever losing touch with his Greek roots and inheritance. He went on to study, first, at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, where he was taught by Günter Bialas and at the International Music Centre in Darmstadt, where he encountered the ideas of such figures as Boulez, Ligeti, Berio and Stockhausen. He went on to academic posts at several universities in the USA, including Stanford and Utah, before being appointed professor of composition at Boston in 1978; from 1978-85 he was co-director of contemporary music at the Tanglewood Music Center and in 1989 he became President of the Union of Greek Composers. He was a prolific composer, writing for both the concert hall and for film and theatre. In the 1950s his work had affinities with the European avant-garde of the time and later some of his music seems to register the example of Zimmermann and Penderecki. But he also wrote much music which might be described as mainstream modern. I can recommend, for example, Konstantinos Destounis’s recording of Antoniou’s Complete Piano Music (Grand Piano, GP 779, 2018) which I was able to listen to at length when a friend loaned me his copy soon after its release. I was very favourably impressed by the range, skill and inventiveness of Antoniou’s writing for the keyboard. Antoniou was praised by figures such as Bernstein, “I believe in Antoniou and I will heartily endorse and help any project dear to him, since what is good for him is invariably good for Music” and Ligeti, “He is a very gifted and important composer”. (Both quotations are taken from page 9 of Vasiliki Fourla, Theodore Antoniou: The Greek Components of his Flute Music, Master of Music, Project Report, California State University, Long Beach, 2016).
Hommage is designed as a tribute to Antoniou’s fellow composer and good friend Manos Hadjikadis (1925-1994) – whose surname is sometimes spelled ‘Hatzidakis’. It is in 8 sections, each based on a work by Hadjikadis: (i) ‘Captain Michaelis: There Was No Island’, (ii) ‘Dream of the Neighbourhood Youth’, (iii) ‘The Ballad of Uri’, (iv) ‘The Train has Left’, (v) ‘Waltz of Lost Dreams’, (vi) ‘Folk Couplets’, (vii) ‘Eagle Without Wings’ and (viii) ‘Kemal’. The guitar has a prominent role throughout, often providing the initial statement of the theme, sometimes introducing a variation on it. There is, however, also much pleasure to be had from the quality of Antoniou’s orchestral writing for the strings. Hadjikadis was classically trained and wrote a number if works in established classical forms, but he was better known, both in Greece and beyond, for his ‘popular’ melodies and songs, such as ‘Never on [a] Sunday’, ‘Dance with My Own Shadow’ and ‘The Grey Cat’. We should remember, however that for historical reasons too complex to discuss here “in Greece, the demarcation between art and popular music, so typical of Western musical culture, is less clearly defined. Indeed the whole notion of high- and low-brow music is difficult to apply in Greece” (Michaelis Andronikou and Friedemann Sallis, ‘Centring the Periphery: Local Identity in the Music of Theodore Antoniou and Other Twentieth-Century Greek Composers’, Intersections, 33(1), 2012, pp. 11-34; quotation from p.15). Like Mikis Theodorakis, Hadjikadis often felt unhappy that his ‘serious’ works – such as the extended piano piece ‘Rhythmology’’ or his song-cycle ‘Megalos Erotikas’ were overlooked, in favour of his popular ‘hits’. In his Hommage, Antoniou has largely concentrated on what one might call (while bearing in mind the implicit warning by Andronikou and Sallis quoted above) the ‘popular’ end of Hadjikadis’ output, while not simply producing a list of Hadjikadis’ ‘greatest hits’. Certainly, Antoniou’s treatments savour Hadjikadis’ lovely melodies as, for example, in ‘Waltz of Lost Dreams’. That he doesn’t include versions of ‘classical’ works such as those mentioned earlier perhaps involves a judgement that Hadjikadis had formed these works as he wanted them to stand and that any ‘reworking’ of them might be inherently disrespectful. While Hommage provides almost half-an-hour of enjoyable listening, it can’t be said to be the very best of either Antoniou or Hadjikadis.
For me, the attraction of this CD lies in its variety of musical idioms and in the opportunity to enjoy the artistry of two outstanding young musicians, Dimitris Soukaras and Lotte Betts-Dean.
Glyn Pursglove
