Σωκράτης Σινόπουλος Quartet

Four musicians sit in a room small enough that you can see the rosin dust lift from the bow. The instrument at the center looks like nothing else on stage — a pear-shaped, three-stringed Byzantine relic, smaller than a violin, held upright on the knee. When the bow draws across the strings, the sound is nasal, sustained, older than any genre label you could attach to it. This is the politiki lyra — the lyra of Constantinople — and the man playing it has spent thirty-five years making it speak in contexts its makers never imagined.

Sokratis Sinopoulos picked up the lyra at fourteen, studying under Ross Daly in Athens before joining Daly's ensemble Labyrinthos a year later. He won the Melina Mercouri award for young artists in 1999. Then the instrument began traveling: Eleni Karaindrou enlisted his lyra for the score of Theo Angelopoulos's The Weeping Meadow. Charles Lloyd and Maria Farantouri brought him to the Herod Atticus Odeon for the Athens Concert, released on ECM in 2011. That same label — Manfred Eicher's ECM, where Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek record — signed the Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet for two albums: Eight Winds in 2015 and Metamodal in 2019, both recorded at Sierra Studios in Athens. The quartet — Sinopoulos on lyra, Yann Keerim on piano, Dimitris Tsekouras on bass, Dimitris Emmanouil on drums — plays compositions that treat the lyra as lead voice, supported by a rhythm section trained in jazz but reaching toward something modal and Mediterranean.

The audience for a Sinopoulos quartet performance draws from several directions: jazz listeners who followed ECM's catalog to Athens, conservatory students studying ethnomusicology, longtime followers of Greek traditional music who want to hear the instrument in unfamiliar harmonic territory, couples who chose a night that asks for attention rather than background noise.

| Aspect | Details | |--------|---------| | **Setting** | Concert #1 Baumstrasse, Athens — intimate music venue | | **Vibe** | Concentrated, exploratory, respectful — a listening room where the instrument leads | | **Sound** | Politiki lyra over piano, bass, and drums — modal compositions between Byzantine tradition and jazz | | **Door** | Ticketed |

The quartet's compositions build slowly. Keerim's piano lays harmonic frameworks that the lyra enters like a voice joining a conversation already in progress. Tsekouras and Emmanouil keep the pulse understated — present enough to feel, quiet enough that the lyra's nasal sustain hangs in the air between phrases. The mode shifts are where the music lives: scales from Byzantine chant slipping into jazz voicings and back, without the transition ever sounding forced. The four musicians listen to each other with the patience of people who have been playing together since 2010.

If you are looking for high-energy performance or music that fills the room with volume, this quartet operates at a different register — the intensity is in the detail, not the decibels. But if you want to hear an instrument that predates Western notation played by a musician who has recorded for one of the most selective labels in the world, in a room sized for the kind of attention this music rewards, this is the night.

Concert #1 Baumstrasse hosts the performance on Friday, March 6 at 21:00. Ticket pricing is to be announced — check the venue or Athinorama listing for updates as the date approaches.

An ECM recording artist, a Byzantine instrument, and a quartet that has had fifteen years to learn how silence works between the notes.