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Diotima Quartet

“The new ruins of Athens”: Works by Béla Bartók and Alexandros Markeas

Dates

Prices

5 — 12 €

Location

Onassis Stegi
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Time & Date

Day
Time
Venue
Day
Thursday
Time
21:00
Venue
Upper Stage

Information

Tickets

Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from 28 FEB 2019, 12:00
General presale: from 7 MAR 2019, 12:00

Full price: 7, 12 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 10 €
Groups 10+ people: 9 €
Νeighborhood residents: 7 €
People with disabilities & Unemployed: 5 € | Companions: 7, 10 €

Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org

Duration

1 hour and 30 minutes

Both composers set out to combine traditional and art music, the sounds of their homeland with the feel of their era, and also look back–in their own way–to Beethoven. The concertsʼ works are performed by the internationally acclaimed quartet Diotima.

Béla Bartók's six string quartets, of which we will be listening to the first two, bring together the most characteristic musical innovations of the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, they also have a lot in common with Beethoven's last quartets: their musical material is produced with exemplary economy out of a few musical 'cells', shaped in a free and organic way, inducing intense concentration in the listener, who enters a profoundly intimate world.

Alexandros Markeas relates to Beethoven in a different way: with humour, that verges sometimes to bitter, he paraphrases the title of the German composer’s hugely popular incidental music “The Ruins of Athens” (1811), in which the goddess Athena coexists with characters from Ottoman Athens. What is, for the Greek composer, the sound of the new ruins of his city, what memories do they bring to the surface, and how do they coexist alongside those other ruins which surround us for centuries?

Photo: Jérémie Mazenq

Program

Béla Bartók: “Quartet no. 2” (1917)
Alexandros Markeas: “The new ruins of Athens” (2018), Greek premiere
Béla Bartók: “Quartet No. 1” (1909)

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"For me, music is a wonderful way to explore otherness. The driving forces of my work, and the foundations of a music I experience as an eminently political art, are: understanding our world through its songs and sounds, being sensitive to its contradictions and its roughness, and decoding the way we think by capturing the sonic phenomenon.

I set out to underscore the bonds which link contrasting categories in the musical field: art and traditional music, written scores and oral transmission, improvisation and interpretation. I try to combine different times and places in order to achieve a music of our times, multifaceted and contradictory".
Alexandros Markeas, program notes for the 2015–2016 season of the Orchestre national de Lorraine.

The subject-matter of his recent works—"Une autre Odysée" [Another Odyssey] (2016), "Citoyenne insolente" [Insolent citizen] (2014), "Trois fois Hellas" [Three times Greece] (2013), etc.—deals explicitly with current affairs and with Greece, as does the quartet to be performed here, which was commissioned by the Festival des Arts de Monte Carlo.

Diotima Quartet

  • violin

    Yun-Peng Zhao

  • violin

    Constance Ronzatti

  • viola

    Franck Chevalier

  • cello

    Pierre Morlet

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