Cretan Poetry in Nikos Mamagkakis’ music

«The Extreme Cretan Music World»
Contemporary Cretan Music Festival 2021
Sunday 31 of October 2021
21:00
Experimental Stage

Circle | Festival

Tribute to Nikos Mamagkakis’ music and its relationship with the scholar and folk Cretan poetry. Savina Giannatou, Eirini Derebei and Panos Papaioannou will give to the audience of Heraklion the chance to listen to lyrics from rizitiko songs, parts from Erotokritos, Erofili, The Cretan war, poems of barba-Patzelios, of Pantelis Prevelakis, of Kostas Fragoulis and others, as the Rethymnian composer set them to music in different periods of his creating process.

Grefit Μαριλένα Σταφυλίδου

Art Direction: Chrisanna Karelli

Credits:

Savina Yannatou | singing
Irini Derebei | singing
Panos Papaioannou | singing

Bio:

Savina Yannatou | singing
Savina Yannatou studied singing with G.Georgilopoulou and Spiros Sakkas΄s Workshop of Vocal Art in Athens. On a scholarship from Mousigetis Foundation, she attended London΄s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1979 she began working as a professional, in the Greek National Radio 3, in collaboration with the composer Lena Platonos. Since then she has collaborated in Greece mainly with the composers: L. Platonos,N. Mamangakis, M.Grigoriou, D.Marangopoulos, D.Kamarotos,V.Katsoulis, and others. In the '80s she has been a founding member of the ensemble Early Music Workshop, in Athens. Since 1994 Yannatou has performed and recorded with the band Primavera en Salonico, Sephardic and Mediterranean songs. Together they have recorded 8 CDs for Lyra records and ECM, and they are touring all over the world giving concerts at many festivals and venues the Barbican and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Melbourne Concert Hall, Symphony Space in New York, the London Jazz festival, many WOMAD festivals all over the world, Stern Grove Festival in San Francisco, Moers New Music Festival, Rudolstadt Folk Festival, UCLA in Los Angeles, The Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, and many more. As a free jazz vocalist, Yannatou has collaborated with Peter Kowald, Barry Guy, Günther Baby Sommer, Floros Floridis, Günther Pitscheider, Gerald Preinfalk, Nikos Touliatos, the group "medea electronique"a.o. She has composed music for theatre and for pantomime (National Theatre of Greece, National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessalian Theatre, Theatre of Neos Kosmos and "Playback" theatre, for the plays: Medea, Bacchae, Ifigenia in Aulis, Dibuk, The Caukasian Chalk Circle, Persona, The Suppliants, The Arrival of Ullisses, The woman of Zakynthos). She has released approximately 25 CDs as a singer, vocalist and composer-songwriter. She occasionally gives workshops on free vocal improvisation.

Irini Derebei | singer
She was born and raised in Athens, where she studied music theory and singing under Marina Krilovic. She is a graduate of the Athens Conservatoire (monody diploma with honours, under Meni Charalambidou) and the Pallini Music High School; she plays the tanpura, the kaval and the Constantinople lute (or lafta), and has engaged in traditional, Byzantine and western music. A multitude of musical genres help her shape her own musical personality and develop a personal sound and special technique, incorporating a variety of musical idioms. She started singing in recordings at a very young age, working with the Greek Music Archive and Chronis Aidonidis. In 1993, she founded the Palaiina Seferia ensemble together with Karolos Kouklakis and Zacharias Spyridakis. They recorded two albums and gave concerts in Greece and abroad. She has participated in numerous album productions and has worked with renowned musicians and composers in Greece and abroad, such as Chronis Aidonidis, Ross Daily, Nikos Mamangakis, Vangelis Papathanasiou, Christos Leontis, Yiannis Markopoulos,Nikos Xydakis,George Koumentakis, George Tsontakis, Jordi Savall, etc.). She has been working with Karolos Kouklakis, since 2008, on a new approach to Cretan music, giving concerts in Greece and abroad (Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, Ferara, Brussels, Corsica, etc. In 1993, she won the best performance award at the 2nd Cretan Music Festival “Kostas Mountakis”. Some of her concert performances are available on the Internet. She teaches tanpura at the Pallini Music High School, as well as singing at MELMOKE and in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Panos Papaioannou | singer
Panos Papaioannou is a performer from Thessaloniki. He became famous through the Greek Song Creation Competitions, that were organised by the Greek Design and Onassis Foundation Stegi of Letters and Arts, in December 2013 and through the song Merokamata (Wages) of Chrisostomos Karantoniou and Dimitris Papacharalambous, which won the audience prize and love of the audience through the radio. He made two albums with the same artists, The Dance of the Days and The Lights in the Square, on cooperation with Dimitra Galani, Pantelis Thalassinos, Maria Papageorgiou, Apostolos Rizos, Lambrini Karakosta. In October of 2004 he met the composer Nikos Mamagakis and they recorded together the 11+2 Folk Songs on poems of Yannis Ritsos, as well as a great number of other songs of him. He has cooperated with a lot of artists, like Giorgos Stavrianos, Giorgos Zikas, Melina Kana, Manolis Lidakis, Lizeta Kalimeri, Kostas Parisis, Stavros Siolas, Savina Yannatou, Zacharias Karounis, Pantelis Kiramargios, Saveria Margiola, Pantelis Theocharis, and others. In March of 2019, he started a cooperation with Dimitris Papadimitriou, from which their participation in the show The Big Heretic in the Onassis Foundation and many concerts of the composer, as well as the song Vardia with Veronica Davaki, occurred.

Maria Pachnisti | flutes
Maria Pachnisti was born in Volos, Greece in 1981. As a flute performer (2004, Diploma of Flute Performance from the Orfeion Conservatory of Athens), she has collaborated with a variety of music ensembles and organizations, among others with the Greek National Opera (2007-2010, La Bohème, direct. Graham Vick) and with the Athens Youth Symphony Orchestra (2007, conductor Pavlos Sergiou). She worked with the renowned composer Nikos Mamangakis for five years (2008-2013, concerts and recordings). Since 2004 she has been working as a flute teacher in Secondary Education (Music Schools of Tripoli, Sparta etc.) and at private conservatories in Athens, Sparta and Korinthos (National Conservatory of Sparta, National Conservatory of Glyfada etc.).
She was an active participant in many flute masterclasses with renowned flutists (e.g. Lóránt Kovacs, Jean-Claude Gerard, Philippe Pierlot, Paul Edmund-Davies, Liisa Ruoho, Richard Davis, István Matuz, Peter-Lukas Graf, etc.) From 2016 to 2018 she attended an intensive postgraduate course in flute performance with the flute professor Natalia Gerakis in Athens Conservatoire.
A graduate of the Department of Music Studies (2013) and the Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology (2004, Bachelor’s degree with a major in Pedagogy) of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she received her master’s degree from the Department of Music Studies of the Ionian University on the subject of “Musicology: Neo Hellenic Music”.

Lefteris Andriotis I lyra
Lefteris Andriotis was born in Athens. He is a graduate of the Music School of Pallini. He studied classic theory and harmony, jazz interpretation and orchestration at the conservatory Filippos Nakas. He has attended composition lessons with V. Foster. He has cooperated with Nikos Mamagakis, Louis Borda, Savina Giannatou, Charoula Alexiou, Giannis Charoulis, as well as with several Greek groups of jazz and world music.

Chrysostomos Karantoniou | classic guitar
He was born in Thessaloniki in 1981. In 2002 he finished his studies with scholarship at the Contemporary Conservatory of Crete, with Evaggelos Asimakopoulos, with who he took his diploma with excellent grades. In 1999, after a cooperation with Nikos Mamagakis, he recorded the New Excursion for solo guitar, which was released in 2000, under the tittle Excursion & Parenthesis. During the periods 2005-2006 and 2209-2013 he participated in several recordings of the same composer’s pieces, which were released by his company, IDAIA. The top of this cooperation was the album Rebetorio for solo guitar, that he performed. He has done recitals in several cities in Greece and abroad. Greek composers have dedicated their compositions to him, as Nikos Mamagakis did to his guitar suite, which he named Makis (Chrysostomos) Suite, Kostas Aggouridis to his work Apopsis and Leontios Chatzileontiadis to his work Running Bach…, which is also dedicated to his teacher Dimitris Ioannou. He has performed many times as a soloist with the National TV Symphonic Orchestra in Megaron Concert Hall and Herodion. In 2004 he composed the work OLVION for string orchestra and guitar, which is the music for the poem in the same name of the poet Konstantinos Routis.

Alexandros Kapsokavadis | lutes
He was born in Athens in 1981. At the age of ten, he started getting guitar and music theory lessons.
As a student at Western Athens Music High School, he learnt to play Plucked Stringed Musical Instruments from famous teachers, like Christos Tsiamoulis and Nikos Grapsas. After Lyceum, he studied Musicology and took Turkish Classical Music lessons from Ross Daly, specializing in Lavta (lute from Constantinople). He focused in Ethnomusicology and Social Anthropology, completing his MA (2010) and PhD (2015) at The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has taught Traditional Musical Instruments at the Music Schools of Alimos, Ilion and Pallini (Athens) since 2001. He has also worked as an elementary school music teacher from 2009 to 2021. He has collaborated with various artists in Greece (Stavros Xarchakos, Nikos Mamangakis, Nikos Xydakis, Haris Alexiou, Dimitra Galani, Glykeria, Alkistis Protopsalti, Savina Yannatou, Haig Yazdjian, κ.ά.) as a musical performer and he has recorded his own albums in the Greek discography as a songwriter.

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