Lieder ohne worte

Finally, the GNO Ballet director Konstantinos Rigos bases his choreography for the third part of this “alternative journey” on three works by the accomplished Greek-German composer Dimitri Terzakis, beginning with the delicate Sprüche im Wind (Words in the Wind, 2009), consisting of ten brief, succinct “haikus” for violin and piano. The work is dedicated to the violinist Danae Papamattheou-Matschke. The next two pieces are inspired respectively by modern Greek history and by the legacy of ancient Greece. The work Der Hölle Nachklang I (Resonance of Hell I, 1992), for alto saxophone and piano, constitutes the composer’s emotionally charged reaction (“though without any feelings of hate”, as he notes) to his unbearable childhood memories of the German Occupation of Greece during his early childhood in Athens in the years 1941-1944. The third piece, Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words), a vocal work from 1994 presented here in its recent version for solo viola (2017), is an apotheosis of melody based on the musical system of antiquity. The composer notes: “To present the infinitesimal melodic nuances and rapidly changing characters, the interpretation of this composition may and must be endlessly free, poetic, song-like, speech-like and, yes, ‘old-fashioned’ – like in the theatre of ancient Greece”.