Εποχές Τέσσερις

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Athens in late January runs cold and wet; the programme for Friday 29 January 2027 at the Christos Lambrakis Hall answers with two borrowed climates — the humid seasons of Buenos Aires and the sunlight of Mendelssohn's Italy — played by the Athens State Orchestra at 20:30.

«ΕΠΟΧΕΣ ΤΕΣΣΕΡΙΣ» — Seasons Four — takes its title from the centrepiece: Astor Piazzolla's Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, four tangos written between 1965 and 1970 for his own quintet and recast by Leonid Desyatnikov for solo violin and string orchestra, with quotations from Vivaldi's Four Seasons stitched through the tango fabric. Soloist Leticia Moreno is not feeling her way into this repertoire: the Spanish violinist recorded the Desyatnikov arrangement on her 2017 Piazzolla album. On the podium is Antonio Méndez, the Mallorca-born conductor who led the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife from 2018 to 2021 and has appeared with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and the Vienna Symphony.

The printed order frames the tangos. Schubert's introduction to Rosamunde, D. 644, opens the evening as an early-Romantic curtain-raiser; then Moreno and the strings take over for Piazzolla's four seasons, tango rhythm against baroque ghosts. Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4, the Italian, closes the night — its finale is a saltarello, a dance movement that runs rather than walks.

The crowd mixes the subscription rows with the contingent the word Piazzolla reliably pulls: tango dancers on their night off, string players checking how the arrangement sits under a soloist's fingers, couples who chose this over dinner and made the better call.

The Christos Lambrakis Hall is the Megaron's main symphonic room — the Athens State Orchestra is in residence here — with unamplified acoustics that flatter string sound in particular. Seats run 50, 40, 30 and 20 EUR, with reduced tickets at 12 EUR, through the Megaron box office and webtics.megaron.gr.

Presale opens on Monday 27 July 2026, a full six months before the concert date — a detail worth knowing if you want a full choice of seat and price tier. The Megaro Moussikis metro station sits beside the building, and the 20:30 start is exact.

If the phrase Four Seasons has you picturing Vivaldi's originals, adjust: the Venetian appears only in cameo, filtered through Piazzolla's tango harmonies and Desyatnikov's arrangement. But if you like your seasons with knife-edge string attacks and a dance pulse underneath, this pairing was assembled for you.

Vivaldi wrote seasons for Venice and Piazzolla wrote them for Buenos Aires; for one night in January, both climates share a stage in Athens.