Greek Percussion Group: Contemporary percussion music Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

The programme opens with Giorgos Koumendakis's Typewriter Tune, which builds rhythm out of the clatter of a typewriter and hands it to four percussionists. From there the Greek Percussion Group — Marinos Tranoudakis, Panagiotis Ziavras, Thodoris Vazakas and Kostas Seremetis — spend the evening making the case that mallets, skins and struck metal can carry a full concert on their own.

The programme is drawn entirely from Greek and Greek-connected composers writing now. Koumendakis's opener sits beside Georges Aperghis's Retrouvailles and Christos Hatzis's Quantum Transitions, then Mina Bormpoudaki's Unisono. Two works arrive new: Stamatis Pasopoulos's NIGRÁ receives its premiere, and Giorgos Vavoulas contributes a piece commissioned for this stage. Tranoudakis, who leads the ensemble, also curates the venue's own Percussion Festival, so the group is playing on home ground.

The room fills with listeners who follow new music by composer name — people who came for the Aperghis specifically, conservatoire students, and the percussion community that tracks what this ensemble commissions next. Applause holds until each piece has fully ended; nobody claps into a silence that turns out to be a rest. The setting is the GNO Alternative Stage, the below-ground hall at the SNFCC, and the mood is concentrated and score-following, closer to a recital than a night out. What you hear is marimba, drums and struck metal, two pieces of it brand new, and the door is ticketed and seated.

Across about ninety minutes the evening moves from the mechanical patter of the opener toward the denser textures of Hatzis and the two premieres. Percussion at close range rewards attention: the woody knock of the marimba, the dry crack of a snare, a suspended cymbal left to shimmer and decay into the silence before the next attack. You hear the difference between a struck and a brushed surface, and watch four players lock a pattern and then pull it apart bar by bar. The below-ground hall has a dry, controlled acoustic that keeps fast figures legible rather than letting them smear.

If you want melodies you can hum on the way to the tram, a percussion-only programme of living composers will not hand you those. But if you want to hear what Greek composers are writing right now for mallets and skins — including a work nobody has heard before tonight — few concerts are built this single-mindedly around it.

The concert belongs to Contemporary Music Days, the Alternative Stage's eighteen-concert autumn cycle titled Multiple Presents, under the artistic direction of Giannis Angelakis. It begins at 20:30 on 11 November 2026 at the SNFCC. The Cultural Center sits south of the centre on the coast; it is not on the metro network — reach it by the SNFCC shuttle or the tram, and leave a few minutes to cross the park to the entrance.

NIGRÁ has no performance history before this night, and the six-work programme around it is assembled once.