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 GNO Alternative Stage participates in the celebration for the centenary of the birth of the great innovator of 20th-century music Iannis Xenakis with an extensive programme covering the whole spectrum from his groundbreaking soloistic writing to his stage work.
Few people have managed to mark the front line of the previous century's international avant-garde as deeply as Iannis Xenakis, an inexhaustible and widely influential multi-faceted creator who left Greece to settle in Paris during the Greek civil war. His creative intellect was never limited bythe traditional barriers that separate science from art or the arts from each other: in the fifty-year period during which he was active, Xenakis treated music as a privileged field for the expression of universal principles and abstract structures, exploring its relationship with other sectors of human knowledge and activity, such as physics and philosophy, and applying in his compositional method processes originating from stochastic mathematics, set theory, or game theory. At the same time, he was a pioneer in the evolution of electronic music and combined music with architecture in a groundbreaking way in a series of pivotal interdisciplinary works.
The Alternative Stage's tribute starts with Lila Zafiropoulou's new choreographic approach to Xenakis' modernist ballet score Kraanerg, a reaction by the composer to the transformative, yet destructive, power of the youth movements of the late 60s. It is followed by two concert programmes featuring distinguished soloists measuring themselves against Xenakis' transcendentally virtuosic works for percussion (milestone works of the musical avant-garde exploring the boundaries between musical organisation and noise, often inspired by the legacy of ancient Greece) and piano (with Stéphanos Thomopoulos daring to perform the composer's complete piano works). Last but not least, the celebrated dissonArt ensemble from Thessaloniki present a programme of Xenakis' works for chamber ensemble, covering the last two decades of this great and uncompromising creator's musical output.
