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The Athens State Orchestra performs Neos Kosmos kai Nostos at the Christos Lambrakis Hall in Megaron Mousikis on 17 April 2026, with Dinís Sousa conducting, Manos Kitsikopoulos at the piano, and Eleni Calenos as soprano soloist. The program title — New World and Nostos — invokes nostos, the Greek word for homecoming that gave English the word nostalgia. Four works trace what happened when European musical traditions crossed the Atlantic and came back changed, marking the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Sousa is Portuguese, Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and the first assistant conductor of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras. He won the Critics' Circle Young Talent Award in 2023 and drew praise from The Guardian for an "electrifying" Les Troyens at the Salzburg Festival that year. Kitsikopoulos trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, holds the DipRAM — the Academy's highest performance distinction — and won the Grand Prix at the ClaMo International Piano Competition in 2019. Calenos is a Greek soprano born in Thessaloniki who began as a cellist before shifting to opera in the United States, performing more than twenty roles including Tosca and Cio-Cio San.

The audience for a Friday evening orchestral concert at the Lambrakis Hall splits by interest: subscribers following the KOA season, piano students watching Kitsikopoulos navigate Beethoven from the stalls, and those drawn by the rarity of hearing Barber's Knoxville performed live with full orchestra.

The concert opens with Christos Samaras's Nostos III, commissioned by the Athens State Orchestra — a contemporary Greek composition framing the evening's theme of departure and return. Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 follows — his first published concerto, a work of architectural clarity that gives Kitsikopoulos room for the fingerwork that won him the ClaMo competition. After the interval, Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 sets James Agee's prose poem about a childhood evening in Tennessee — a soprano over a warm orchestral bed singing about lying in the grass while streetcars pass, carrying the weight of remembering something you did not know you were losing. Copland's Appalachian Spring closes — originally a ballet for Martha Graham in 1944, now an orchestral suite building from Shaker simplicity to variations on the hymn Simple Gifts.

If you prefer intimate chamber settings where you hear a bow touch a string from three metres, the Lambrakis Hall at full orchestral scale is a different animal. But if you want a program connecting a Greek commission to Beethoven to the American pastoral in a single arc, this is one of the more thoughtfully constructed evenings in the KOA season.

Megaron Mousikis sits directly above Megaro Moussikis metro. Tickets range from €10 to €35 — upper circle carries the sound cleanly, centre stalls give direct sightlines to the piano.

A Greek commission, a Beethoven concerto, a soprano singing Tennessee childhood memories in the hall where Athens hears its orchestral season — four works, three soloists, and a conductor who built his career making borrowed traditions sound inevitable.