ΤΕΤΤΤΙX: Five Paths Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Look at what sits on stage before anyone plays: flutes, clarinets, saxophones, a bassoon, an accordion, guitars, a harp, a double bass, percussion. No string quartet at the centre, no piano trio. TETTTIX assembled itself around an instrumentation that had no repertoire waiting for it, which was the point. The ensemble takes its name from the ancient Greek word for cicada, an insect that spends years underground as one creature and one short, loud season as another.

Founded by composer Michalis Paraskakis and performing publicly since 2018, TETTTIX works out of Athens and Chania and has appeared with Onassis Stegi, the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Tectonics Athens and KET. Five Paths gathers works by Nikos Galenianos, Yannis Kyriakides, Michalis Paraskakis, Eleni Ralli and Jani Christou, under conductor Konstantinos Terzakis. Two of those five composers, Galenianos and Paraskakis, play in the ensemble, so part of the evening is musicians performing their own handwriting. The fifth is the ghost in the room. Christou was born in January 1926 and died on his forty-fourth birthday in 1970, which makes 2026 the hundredth anniversary of his birth and this programme one of the year's reckonings with him.

The organising idea is places, real or invented, that we return to by memory or escape into by imagination. Five composers, five routes, one evening.

The setting is the Alternative Stage, the Greek National Opera's smaller house inside the SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ), a black box whose telescopic seating is retracted and rebuilt for each production, so the room is not the same shape twice. The vibe is attentive rather than reverent, with people reading the programme note before the lights drop and arguing about it in the foyer afterwards. The sound is acoustic and close, no pit between you and the accordion. The door is ticketed through ticketservices.gr.

You will sit among listeners who follow composers the way other people follow bands, the sort who can date a piece from its first thirty seconds and will find you afterwards to say you were wrong. Nobody claps between movements. The applause at the end runs long.

Five Paths sits inside Days of Contemporary Music, an eighteen-concert cycle running across October and November 2026 under the artistic direction of composer Giannis Angelakis, and it belongs to the first season the Alternative Stage has organised into themed strands rather than a flat calendar.

If you want melodies to carry home, this is not that concert. New music asks you to listen forward instead of to recognise. But if you want five living answers to one question, plus a sixth from a composer who ran out of time in 1970, the players are close enough to watch breathe.

Getting there takes planning. The SNFCC is on the Kallithea coast with no metro station, so take the free SNFCC shuttle from central Athens, the tram, or a bus, and allow more time than the distance suggests. Curtain at 20:30 on 25 October 2026.

An anniversary programme performed by the ensemble two of its composers play in.