Places, Memories, Sirens - Violoncello recital Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Places, Memories, Sirens gathers four works that each reach for something out of arm's reach — a landscape returned to, a line remembered, a voice that lures from the rocks. Arne Zeller plays them on cello, with Jacopo Giovannini at the piano, in the black-box GNO Alternative Stage inside the SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ).

Zeller is nineteen. In 2025 he took both the first prize and the audience prize at the Budapest International Cello Competition; he trained at the Leipzig conservatory under Peter Bruns and now studies with Frans Helmerson at the Kronberg Academy. This Athens recital reaches the Alternative Stage through a collaboration with that same competition — the prize winner brought to a room that programmes new work.

The crowd is the contemporary-music core the Alternative Stage has built across its first ten years: composition students, cellists who came to watch bow arm and left hand at close range, listeners who follow commissions rather than famous names. The room is quiet in the way a recital demands — seated, attentive, the space small enough that a pianissimo carries.

The programme runs a century in four steps. Mendelssohn's Cello Sonata No. 2 in D major, Op. 58, opens the door with Romantic warmth; Frank Bridge's Cello Sonata carries English late-Romantic lyricism as it darkens toward the modern; Thomas Adès's 'Lieux retrouvés' — reclaimed places — fractures landscape into cello writing that leaps and skitters; and Euripides Bekos's 'Thelxinoe', named for one of the Sirens, is a world premiere commissioned by the Alternative Stage. Solo cello and piano hold the whole evening, no ensemble behind them.

If you want a concerto with an orchestra at your back and a tune you already know, this is a smaller, closer night. But if you want to hear Zeller test a line from Mendelssohn to a score written this year, that is exactly the programme.

The SNFCC sits on the Kallithea coast and is reached by tram, bus, or the free shuttle from central Athens — not by metro. The Alternative Stage rebuilds its telescopic seating for each production, so there is no habitual best seat; arrive early enough to choose your sightline. Tickets are 12 or 15 EUR, 10 EUR concession, for a 20:30 start, and the recital sits inside the Contemporary Music Days cycle running 25 October to 14 November.

Bekos's 'Thelxinoe' has never been heard; 4 November is the night it first sounds.