Λιστ με τον Αλεξέι Βολόντιν – 90 χρόνια από τον θάνατο του Αλμπέρ Ρουσέλ

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A masked ball, a sealed abbey, and a plague that walks in anyway — Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" opens this concert not as a reading but as an orchestral score. The Greek composer Nikolaos Astrinidis (1921–2010) turned Poe's story into a choreographic poem, and the State Orchestra of Athens uses it to raise the curtain on an evening that ends in a Greek myth and passes through Liszt on the way.

The centre of the programme is Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat, with Russian pianist Alexei Volodin as soloist. Volodin won the Géza Anda Competition in Zurich in 2003, the prize that launched his career, and he brings a repertoire weighted toward Rachmaninov, Scriabin and the heavy Romantic literature to a concerto Liszt built as a single continuous span rather than three separate movements — the one whose chiming triangle in the scherzo earned it the mocking nickname "the Triangle Concerto." After the concerto, the orchestra plays "Les Préludes," the most famous of the symphonic poems Liszt invented as a form.

Zoi Tsokanou conducts. The evening closes with Albert Roussel's second suite from the ballet "Bacchus et Ariane" — the bright, hard-driven music that carries Ariadne from her waking on Naxos to the closing dionysian dance. The State Orchestra frames the whole night around Roussel (1869–1937), marking ninety years since the French composer's death.

The subscription crowd for these Lambrakis Hall nights arrives early and reads the programme notes before the lights fall — a room that comes to follow a soloist through a concerto, not to be seen. Volodin's Liszt is the draw, but the shape of the evening, from Poe's plague to Roussel's Naxos, is the reason to sit for all three.

If you want a single blockbuster symphony and nothing else, this is a mixed bill — a Greek tone poem, a Romantic concerto, two symphonic poems and a ballet suite, none of them the obvious warhorse. But if you want to hear Volodin play Liszt's First and a French score that rarely reaches Athens programmes, the State Orchestra has built the night around both.

The Megaron stands on Vasilissis Sofias, and the Megaro Moussikis metro station connects to the hall through an underground passage, so you arrive without crossing the avenue. Tickets run from 10 euros, discounted, to 35, and the pre-sale opened on 27 July. The downbeat is 20:30.

The ninetieth-anniversary framing puts Roussel where Athens rarely hears him: the last work on a single night's programme.