Tasos Rosopoulos: Songs About a Return Contemporary Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Return is the oldest argument in Greek poetry — Odysseus spent ten years on it, and Cavafy told us the harbour matters less than the long road back to it. Tasos Rosopoulos builds a whole evening on that argument. «Τραγούδια για μια επιστροφή» (Songs for a Return) is a song cycle about the wish to go home and the difficulty of doing it, and it lands at the Greek National Opera's Alternative Stage on 31 October 2026.

Rosopoulos — an Athens composer who writes across concert music, opera, chamber work and film — wrote the music and handles the samples and live electronics himself. He scores the songs for an unusual small ensemble: the baritone Tasis Christogiannopoulos, Korina Vougiouka on guitar, Alexandros Botinis on cello, and electronic media threaded underneath. The texts are drawn from Cavafy and the contemporary poets Koropouli and Kapsali, then folded together with the German Romantics Wilhelm Müller and Heinrich Heine — the same Müller whose winter journey Schubert set two centuries ago.

The room fills with a listening crowd: people who follow new Greek composition, art-song regulars, and readers who came as much for the poets as the score. This is an audience that stays quiet between numbers and leans in for the words.

The Alternative Stage is a black box with retractable telescopic seating that gets rebuilt for every production, so there is no habitual good seat — you take the sightline the current rig gives you. The sound is chamber-scale and close: one voice, guitar and cello over electronics, not an orchestra. Across the cycle the songs begin in nostalgia and slowly stop caring about a literal destination, turning decay and the passage of time into the real measure of the journey. Christogiannopoulos carries the line while Rosopoulos's samples open a second space behind it.

If you want a big-orchestra night with a familiar tune to hum on the way home, this is not it. But if you want an hour of new Greek song built on the poetry of homecoming — one baritone over guitar, cello and electronics — this is a rare programmed occasion for it.

The evening sits inside «Ημέρες Σύγχρονης Μουσικής» (Days of Contemporary Music), the eighteen-concert cycle running late October into November, and it is part of the Alternative Stage's tenth-anniversary season. Curtain is 20:30. Tickets are 12 or 15 EUR, 10 EUR for students, through ticketservices.gr. The venue is the Greek National Opera's black box inside the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC / ΚΠΙΣΝ); it is not on the metro, so reach it by the free shuttle from central Athens, the coastal tram, or a bus, and allow extra time for the walk in from the park.

One baritone, a guitar, a cello and a laptop, spending an evening on the one journey everyone eventually makes.