Lena Platonos – Maria Farantouri
Fortunes

At what may be the most mature moment of her artistic career, the remarkable Lena Platonos joins hands with the great interpreter of poetic song, Maria Farantouri. It is the third time the legendary singer performs Platonos’ work in a first rendition, this time at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, in an encounter of the highest calibre that will be centred around three distinct works.

The poetesses of antiquity, their stories, their scattered yet glorious fragments – only a handful of luminous remains. Sappho – the towering figure and “mother” of them all – alongside Corinna, Telesilla, Anyte, Praxilla, Moero, Nossis, Diophile, Erinna, the evil eye healers, and many others whose names alone have survived. Nature and its humble creatures; the bond between women; love and war; death and life; the fragile equilibrium between the sexes – all take centre stage in their mellifluous and tender songs.

Lena Platonos – innately 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, as sung heroines. With her electronic palette, she infuses their words with contemporary textures while 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. Through Platonos’ music and narration, together with Farantouri’s performance, these poetesses are retrieved from oblivion, reborn as songs of the present and for all time, as they truly deserve. The original narrative texts and their renderings into modern Greek are by Thanos Tsaknakis.

The composition Fortunes – Platonos’ new work, set to poetry by Tsaknakis and shaped under her musical direction, written for the internationally acclaimed flautist Stathis Karapanos and the iconic voice of Farantouri – enters into a poetic dialogue with Plato’s philosophy of the soul’s immortality, as articulated in the Myth of Er in his Republic.

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.