ΣΩΚΡΑΤΗΣ ΣΙΝΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ QUARTET «Metamodal»

Seven hundred square meters of converted studio space, and the quartet has chosen to fill it with the sound of a single bowed string. The Constantinople lyra that Sokratis Sinopoulos draws across his knee produces a tone that is older than the room, older than the neighborhood, older than the city in its current form. You hear it before you process it — a frequency that sits somewhere between a human voice and a prayer.

Sinopoulos was born in Athens in 1974, studied Byzantine music and classical guitar as a child, and switched to the lyra at fourteen. Within a year he was performing with his mentor Ross Daly. He has since become the figure most responsible for reviving the Constantinople lyra as a contemporary instrument, moving it out of ethnomusicological preservation and into active conversation with jazz, improvisation, and composed music. His ECM Records career began as a sideman on Eleni Karaindrou's film scores and Charles Lloyd and Maria Farantouri's Athens Concert, recorded live at the Herod Atticus Odeon in 2011. His own quartet — with pianist Yann Keerim, bassist Dimitris Tsekouras, and drummer Dimitris Emmanouil — released Eight Winds on ECM in 2015, followed by Metamodal in 2019, both produced by Manfred Eicher. The quartet's most recent duo recording with Keerim, Topos, appeared on ECM in late 2025.

The audience for Sinopoulos draws from communities that rarely sit in the same room: jazz listeners who follow ECM releases, world music devotees who know the lyra tradition, conservatory students studying Byzantine modes, and curious Athenians who heard the name and trusted the venue. Between pieces, the conversations cross these boundaries.

| Aspect | Details | |--------|---------| | **Setting** | Baumstrasse Studio, Servion 8, Votanikos — 700 sqm multi-arts space with modern AV, flexible layout | | **Vibe** | Concentrated, cross-genre, reverent toward the instrument — a listening room by consensus | | **Sound** | Acoustic-forward: lyra, piano, bass, drums — four instruments in dialogue, amplification supporting rather than shaping | | **Door** | Ticketed via ticketservices.gr |

Metamodal — the album and the concept — explores what happens when Byzantine modes meet jazz improvisation and contemporary composition. The three pieces subtitled "Liquid," "Illusions," and "Dimensions" push the quartet into post-modal territory, where the Greek root meta carries its full weight: among, between, behind, altered. In performance, these compositions open spaces for collective improvisation that the studio recordings can only suggest. Keerim's piano responds to the lyra's intervals with voicings that neither tradition would produce alone.

If you want a conventional classical concert with a program of familiar repertoire, or an evening of traditional dimotika, the Sinopoulos Quartet occupies neither category — the music demands attention and offers no easy handles. But if you want to hear an ancient instrument interrogate modern harmonic language in real time, played by musicians whose collective vocabulary spans Byzantine chant, jazz, and contemporary composition, Baumstrasse is the room.

Baumstrasse Studio is at Servion 8 in Votanikos. The nearest metro is Metaxourgeio. The concert starts at 21:00 on March 6, 2026. Tickets are available through ticketservices.gr, with a 5% service charge for online purchases. The venue is flexible in configuration — arrive early for a position close to the performers.

Three ECM albums, a lyra tradition that stretches back centuries, and a quartet that has spent fifteen years learning to improvise across those distances. The room at Baumstrasse holds all seven hundred square meters of possibility.