Late Night με την Κρατική Ορχήστρα Αθηνών

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

The Athens State Orchestra usually plays while it is still light out. This evening waits for the dark: a 20:30 curtain in the Megaron's largest hall, a bill tilted toward the nocturnal, and two soloists whose instruments almost never share a symphony stage — a trumpet and an oud. This is the orchestra's second Late Night, a format built to move the concert to a later hour and fill it with music of a more after-dark disposition.

Panagiotis Diamantis conducts. The trumpet belongs to Pacho Flores, the Venezuelan player and composer who founded the Simón Bolívar Brass Quintet, records for Deutsche Grammophon, and took first prize at the Maurice André, Philip Jones and Città di Porcia international competitions. He opens with Alexander Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto in A-flat major, then plays his own "Cantos y Revueltas," a fantasy concertante he wrote for trumpet and orchestra. After the interval the oud takes over: Alekos Vretos performs excerpts from Marcel Khalife's "Al Andalus" suite, an oud concerto that is a first for this orchestra. The night ends on the dances from Alberto Ginastera's ballet "Estancia," Op. 8a.

The crowd is the Friday-symphony audience with its curiosity up — subscribers who follow Latin-American brass writing and Eastern Mediterranean strings with equal attention, and newcomers drawn by the two headline instruments rather than the composers' names. It is a room that leans forward when a cadenza earns it.

The setting is the Christos Lambrakis Hall, the main auditorium of the Megaron — Μέγαρο Μουσικής Αθηνών — and its most demanding acoustic. The mood sits looser than a standard subscription night: later, warmer, less formal. The sound travels a long arc: Arutiunian's Armenian lyricism, the Andalusian modes Khalife draws from the oud, and Ginastera's Argentine dance rhythms to send you out. Tickets run from EUR 10 at the concession rate up to EUR 35.

The programme is sequenced like a night rather than a lecture. Flores front-loads the brilliance — Arutiunian's fanfares, then the cross-rhythms of his own concertante. Vretos answers in a quieter register, the oud's plucked lines threading through the strings. Then Ginastera's malambo lifts the tempo one last time before the lights come up.

If you want the reassurance of the standard canon — a symphony, a concerto, an overture in the usual order — this is not that night. But if you want a trumpet virtuoso and an oud soloist on the same stage under one baton, the Late Night series was designed for exactly this pairing.

The Megaron is accessible by metro; the Megaro Moussikis station opens directly into the building, so the walk from platform to seat is short even at a late start. Doors are for a 20:30 performance in the Christos Lambrakis Hall on Friday, 16 October.

One evening, one baton, and a trumpet-and-oud bill the orchestra has assembled for one night, 16 October.