Κρατική Ορχήστρα Αθηνών

The Athens State Orchestra closes its winter season at the Christos Lambrakis Hall on 5 June, with Nikos Chaliasas curating and conducting a program titled *Contemporary Antiquity*. Nineteen hundred and sixty seats rake upward toward a pipe organ that fills the back wall, and the room settles into the held silence that precedes an orchestra's first breath.

Chaliasas, a violinist as well as a conductor, built the evening around one thread: Greek composers across three centuries, each pulled toward the ancient world. The oldest voice belongs to Spyros Samaras (1861–1917) — the composer Athens still hears every four years, since he wrote the Olympic Anthem first performed at the 1896 Games — represented here by his *Epinikia*, the victory odes. Alongside him sit Iosif Mastrekinis (1842–1903) and, from the last century, Nikiforos Rotas (1929–2004), whose Concerto Grosso sets an unlikely trio of tuba, viola and piano against the orchestra. The program's living anchor is a commission written for this orchestra: the *Concerto of Corinth* for guitar and orchestra by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer (born 1939).

A closing-night audience at the Lambrakis Hall assembles by intent — subscribers who follow the orchestra's season as a whole, guitarists who came specifically for Brouwer, and listeners after Greek repertoire that concert halls rarely program. It is a formal occasion without being a severe one, the kind of evening the Megaron foyer fills slowly before the doors.

The night swings between scale and intimacy. Rotas's Concerto Grosso pushes a tuba into solo territory it almost never occupies; Brouwer's concerto asks a single plucked guitar to hold its own against a full symphony orchestra, which means the hall drops to near-silence to let it speak. Samaras and Mastrekinis return the evening to the late-Romantic Greek idiom that predates the rest.

If you came for the warhorses — the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky that sell themselves — this is not that night. But if you want to hear what Greek composers made of their own mythology across a hundred and fifty years, this program gathers it in one sitting.

The Megaron sits directly above Megaro Moussikis metro, one stop from Syntagma. Tickets run €8 to €25 through more.com; the upper circle carries the orchestra cleanly and costs the least. The foyer opens well before the 21:00 start, so arrive early enough to cross it, where the glass wall turns toward Lycabettus.

It is the orchestra's final program before the season closes — the one night this year Athens hears its own composers answer the ancient world.