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The New Hellenic Quartet has first performed the four works of Theodorakis
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THE TITLES
Quartet No. 1 “Turn” (1945, Athens)
Quartet No. 2 “The Cemetery” (1945, Athens)
Quartet No. 3 “Epoca Noturna” (1948, first version)
Quartet No. 4 “Mass” (1954, Athens)
QUARTET No1: “Turn”
In 1944 (at the end of the foreign Occupation) and 1945 (essentially the beginning of the Civil War) two major “turns” occurred in the composer’s life -- in his personal life, with his meeting and relationship with Myrto, and concurrently, in his music with his exploration of chamber music as a major form of musical expression. The composition of “Quartet No. 1” marks the beginning of this effort. The name “Turn” also refers to the place in Nea Smyrni where Mikis and Myrto had their first rendez-vous and which from then on became their regular meeting place.
QUARTET No2: “The Cemetery”
This is the sub-title of Dionysios Solomos’s poem “The Crazy Mother” which preoccupied the composer from 1942 until 1996, when he completed the second version of his Third Symphony. What moved him most about the poem was the first verse:
“Now that the clear night has unexpectedly found us, and there, on the rocks, the sea is breaking softly on the rocks.”
His homeland had been overwhelmed by the ‘Long Night’ of foreign Occupation, which was about to be repeated in the year immediately following, by the Civil War. The “Quartet No. 2” is one of the many musical works based on the poem.
QUARTET No3: “Epoca Nocturna”
During the very same period (1948) that Theodorakis, in hiding and pursued by the police, was creating a large body of musical ideas on which he would “build,” among others, the “Sextet”, “According to the Sadduceans” and the ode for string orchestra “Oedipus Tyrannus,” on the other side of the planet in far-way Chile, Pablo Neruda, also in hiding and pursued, wrote, in his Libertadores” (Canto General), the line “nuestra epoca nocturna.”
It is clear from another reference in the poem he was also thinking of Greece: “…hoy que los pistoleros se pasean con la ‘cultura occidental’ en brazos, con las manos que matan en Espana,y lash orcas que odscilan en Atenas, ylas deshonora que gobierna a Chile…” (“…now that the gunmen stroll around with ‘western culture’ under their arms, with the hands that kill in Spain, and th nooses that swing in Athens abd the injustice that rules in Chile…”).
At the same time Theodorakis was living his own ‘Epoca Noturna’in the dark age that had settled on the heart of Athens, writing his “Quartet No. 3” under the shadow of the gallows, trying to transform Terror into Music.
QUARTET No4: “Maza”
Maza is a village in western Crete from where Theodorakis’s paternal family originates. The patriarch of the family was the famous lyra-player Thodoromanolis, who was hanged by the Turks in the early 1800’s. It was he who substituted the Cretan lyra (a type of rebec) for the violin, and whose songs and dances became part of the popular tradition.
The word “maza” (mass) inspired by the rocky masses of the White Mountains combined with the war-like rhythms of the Cretan uprising (the continuous, successive uprisings lasted for more than a century) perfectly match the acoustic clumps and abrupt rhythmic patterns that characterize the music of this composition.
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