Lena Platonos – Maria Farantouri

Nature and its humble creatures; the bond between women; love and war; death and life; the fragile equilibrium between the sexes. The little-known world of the poetesses of antiquity comes into view in a performance drawn from Thanos Tsaknakis’s book Fragments of the Silent Ones (“Ton Siopilon Sparagmata”), set to music by Lena Platonos and brought to life by Maria Farantouri. Sappho – the presiding figure and “mother” of them all – alongside Corinna, Telesilla, Anyte, Praxilla, Moero, Nossis, Diophile, Erinna, the evil eye healers, and other women poets of the ancient Greek world – the Silent ones, whose names alone have survived – emerge through the lyrical and tender fragments of this performance like a song both of now and of forever, as they rightly deserve.

Conceived especially for this year’s Athens Epidaurus Festival and for a select series of performances at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, this work sees Lena Platonos and Thanos Tsaknakis pull from oblivion the Platonic idea of the soul’s immortality, reimagining it through the Fortunes, the composer’s new work, presented here for the first time and performed by the internationally acclaimed flute soloist Stathis Karapanos. The texts are narrated by Maria Farantouri.

Lena Platonos – uniquely and by nature attuned to these ancient figures– becomes, through her music, the medium that channels the poetesses into the present, securing for them a life in the future, where they will stand as sung heroines. With her electronic palette, she imbues their words with contemporary textures, while at the same time drawing on the legacy of the ancient Greek modal system and weaving in elements of traditional songcraft. No interpreter could be more fitting for this material than the timeless – and therefore ever-relevant – voice of Maria Farantouri. 

The performance reaches its apex with a return to Platonos’s seminal work Sabotage (1981), a cornerstone of an album that helped shape the vocabulary of electronic music in Greece. Three striking pieces from the album (“One Thousand and One Nights,” “Sabotage,” and “In the Constellation of the Penguin”) are presented here in new arrangements for flute, performed by Stathis Karapanos.