Organization

Conductor

George Tsontakis

Singer

Robin Beer

Featuring Actor

Nikos Laaris

Dramaturge

Elsa Andrianou

Script

Research

Nefeli Maistrali

Music

Set & Costume Supervision

Daphne Aidoni

Lighting designer

Christos Tziogkas

Music coach

Lord Byron (Messolonghi)

Christos Kechris

Lord Byron (poet)

Christina Asimakopoulou

Soprano

Diamanti Kritsotaki

Mezzo-soprano

Margarita Syngeniotou

Dionisios Melogiannidis

Tenors

Nicolas Maraziotis

Vangelis Maniatis

Baritone

Greek National Opera

Orchestra

With the participation of a 9-member instrumental ensemble

Others

9-member instrumental ensemble

The Air of Greece

Athens

Greece

Alternative Stage

Public

Approved

The air of Greece

At the culmination of the Alternative Stage’s tribute to Lord Byron, we find the new music theatre piece by Greek-American composer George Tsontakis, an award-winning creator well-known for the rhetorical and communicative power of his music.

The work, commissioned by the GNO, aspires to nothing less than a reconstruction of the poet’s Greek adventure: Byron arrived at Missolonghi in January 1824 and died there three months later at the age of thirty-six, after an intense period of brave, though confused, involvement with the Greek War of Independence, of meditation on the onset of middle age and his awareness of the oncoming end, of visionary desire for heroic action as well as of impetuous passion for the sixteen-year-old warrior Lukas Chalandritsanos.

The composer sets the “scene” at Byron’s deathbed and undertakes to render the dying poet’s consciousness through a musical and textual synthesis of authentic historical documents (in Greek) and fragments from his poetical work (in English). Sung by a vocal ensemble that combines the functions of English Madrigalists and Greek Chorus, the work juxtaposes the memory of the poet’s passionate and aristocratic youth to the chaotic war conditions he came up against in revolutionary Greece, thus highlighting the transcendent dimension of his ultimate, sublimely Romantic self-sacrifice on the altar of the ideal.

A workshop for young composers with George Tsontakis will take place concurrently with the performances of the work The Air of Greece.

A sentimentalist as well as an ironist, a humanitarian as well as an animal lover, a person of ideas as well as one of passion, a man of action as well as a sybarite, a lover of men as well as women, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, a philhellene to the (untimely) end and, most of all, a poet through and through, Lord Byron incarnated in an exemplary way and like no other figure the enthusiasms, achievements and contradictions of the Romantic movement. In an attempt to artistically render some idea of the magnitude of the work and impact of this precursor of the modern figure of the “superstar”, the GNO Alternative Stage presents throughout 2021 a multifaceted tribute, proportional to an inexhaustible personality that left behind, in only 36 years of life and in addition to 17 (!) volumes of poetry (opportune since its own time to all kinds of dramatic and musical appropriation), memorable political action, a slew of scandals and broken hearts as well as a reputation doomed, one might say, to transhistorical, as well as feverish, mythification.

The GNO tribute, curated by the composer Alexandros Mouzas, traverses the eras, genres and species of musical and theatrical discourse, covering a spectrum that extends from recital (the forgotten Hebrew Melodies, a collaboration between Byron and the Jewish musician Isaac Nathan in the spirit of the former’s Romantic interest for endangered “ethnic” cultures; new musical settings of Byron’s innovative, queer erotic poetry by three young composers) to Greek folk shadow theatre. Predictably, the largest share of the programming is dedicated to contemporary music theatre: a dramatisation of the poet’s letters from Greece by Mouzas; a multimedia tribute to Byron’s daughter and… computer pioneer Ada Lovelace by Yannis Kyriakides and, at the conclusion of the tribute, the new work by the distinguished Greek-American composer George Tsontakis, a treatment of Byron’s last days in Missolonghi.

English

The Air of Greece by Tsontakis, Fra (2021/2021), Dirigent George Tsontakis, Nikos Laaris, Alternative Stage, Athens, Greece

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