Magna Grecia: A Place Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Magna Grecia is the name the ancient world gave to the Greek colonies of southern Italy — a place that was two places at once. This concert takes that doubleness as both subject and method: four saxophones, Italian and Greek players, and a programme that runs composers from each country against the other on one stage.

The Magna Grecia quartet — Guido De Flaviis, Stathis Mavrommatis, Michele Gherardi and Nicola Mogavero — builds the evening with the Italian Institute of Athens. The programme sets the Italians Alessandro Annunziata, Giacomo Cuticchio and Gianluca Cangemi beside the Greeks Giorgos Koumendakis and Dimitris Nikolaou. Its anchor is Nikos Skalkottas: three choral works by the modernist arrive in an arrangement made specifically for saxophone quartet — voices rewritten for reeds, a piece of him you will not hear this way anywhere else.

The audience is a mix — followers of contemporary composition who read a programme by name, the Italian-Greek cultural crowd the Institute draws, and saxophonists who come to hear what four of their own can do together. It is a listening room, not a talking one; applause waits for the double bar. The setting is the GNO Alternative Stage, the below-ground hall at the SNFCC, and the mood is contemporary-classical rather than club or jazz-bar. The sound is a saxophone quartet spanning soprano to baritone, and the door is ticketed and seated.

A quartet of that range can stand in for a choir, an organ or a small band without changing personnel, and the evening tests that flexibility. Cuticchio comes out of a Sicilian tradition; Cangemi and Annunziata write in a current Italian idiom; Koumendakis and Nikolaou answer from the Greek side. The Skalkottas arrangements are the hinge — choral lines, first written for voices, transferred onto four reeds, so you hear a canonical Greek modernist through an instrument he never composed for.

If you come expecting the saxophone of the jazz club, this is the same instrument in a chamber-concert setting, reeds reading from scores. But if you want to hear one family of instruments carry two national schools in a single sitting — with a Skalkottas reworking that exists nowhere else — the programme is built for exactly that.

The concert is part of Contemporary Music Days, the Alternative Stage's eighteen-concert autumn cycle titled Multiple Presents, under the artistic direction of Giannis Angelakis. It starts at 20:30 on 12 November 2026 at the SNFCC. The Cultural Center lies south of the centre on the coast and is not on the metro — reach it by the SNFCC shuttle or the tram, and allow time to walk in through the park.

Three Skalkottas choruses, rewritten for four saxophones, get their hearing on this one night inside a festival that runs to mid-November.