“Journey to the center of music” on the theme of the concert: composer and pianist on stage Christ Papageorgiou talks about Shostakovich, conductor and artistic director of the Athens State Orchestra (KOA) Lukas Karitinos from the podium, he prepares to give the floor to the music, and on a huge screen in the back of the stage we watch a recorded excerpt of Shostakovich himself playing the piano live at a concert; one of the video projections prepared by the director Catherine Evangelicow.

In the piece for the symphony, the curtain opens as World War II bombers drop their bombs on the screen, Churchill forms the sign of victory with his fingers, and the radio operators telegraph the victory “V”. The sound of Morse signals perfectly “talks” to Beethoven’s famous 5th symphony. A historian and professor at the University of Athens also begins the narration. Maria Efthymiou begins and talks about the connection of music with the development of history.

Each Journey to the Center of Music is a well-staged concert performance, an original spectacle of its kind, well-staged by Ms. Evangelicow, a high-class production staged by four elite performers with the assistance of KOA. Orchestra. Started about a year ago with restrained enthusiasm, this artistic adventure initiated by Mr. Karitinos is now, in his words, an “unexpected” but certainly well-received great success. This is a unique spectacle in Greece that now has a fanatical audience and is constantly sold out.

“Each artistic creation is created in a place and in time, so it participates in History,” says Maria Efthymiou.

“Now listen,” Christos Papageorgiou says at one point to an imaginary audience, and quickly moves from explanation to musical examples as a piano soloist or orchestra musician. Standard rehearsal takes place in the KOA test room, and preparation for each “Journey” takes approximately two months. Prose, reminiscent of the natural stage dialogue of three persons, is the product of a long and highly creative process.

The next stop on the route is the apartments on May 5 and 6 at Megaron Musikis. “The suite is the symphonic genre with the greatest duration in time. It starts from the Baroque era and continues to the present day. His original definition was a series of dances, but in the end it was a series of any works that are part of a larger work, opera or theater,” explains Mr. Karitinos. “The historical context of the suite is connected with the European XVII-XVIII centuries and reaches our days. As a genre, it is very popular, it “connects” people with kings,” adds Ms. Efthymiou, referring to the theme of the concert performance.

In our conversation, she admits that her experience in Tagsidia is valuable from all sides, “especially since I don’t know classical music deeply and now I have the honor to study it from the inside and, in fact, from its deepest connoisseurs,” says he to us. As for the reasons that prompted her to participate in this complex project, the main character of which is not History, but music, she answers: “Each artistic creation is created in a place and in time, therefore it participates in History. Therefore, knowledge of the historical period and its coordinates helps to understand the world and the priorities of artists, and hence their works.

Having been introduced to radio and television through his idiosyncratic and popular series of shows “In Search of the Strychnine Lady”, Christos Papageorgiou, in addition to developing the artistic context of each theme, seems to enjoy the theatricality of this piece. “Audiences love The Journey not because we teach them, but because they have fun and come back because they want to relive it,” he explains. As Mr. Karitinos repeats, “music is joy” and with this familiar language they use without being didactic, the audience gets that feeling right away. Let’s not forget, he adds, that symphonic suites have always been a musical journey into a more carefree side of life, one that creates the feeling that a whirlwind and a few notes can grab your hand, take you to other worlds and fix everything. The program includes, among others, works by Edvard Grieg, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, as well as Nino Rota and Manus Hadjidaki.