New Greek Music: Premieres and Frustrations

Last night the Greek Chamber Music Project (GCMP), an arts presenter and record label devoted to the music of Greek composers, brought two world premiere performances to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The performance took place in the Technology Hall of the new Bowes Center building; and it was live-streamed to a You Tube Web page, which is now available for subsequent viewing. This past May, the first of the premieres was released on the latest GCMP album, Synchronos: New Greek Voices, which is available in both physical and digital media through a Bandcamp Web page.

The live-stream turned out to be the first successful effort I have encountered originating from the Bowes Center. The audio quality coming from the chamber music performance on the top floor of the building have consistently been marred by the threshold of inaudibility. It should be no surprise that a room called “Technology Hall” should be better endowed with audio equipment; and while the video account seems to have been limited to a fixed camera, the image was sufficient for viewers to appreciate the musical performance.

The first of the works on the program was an eight-movement suite entitled Talos Dreams, composed by Costas Dafnis. Talos was a figure in Greek mythology that may have been the first imagined automaton. Talos was a bronze giant built to protect the Phoenician princess Europa from pirates and invaders. Thanks to his size, he could circle the entire island of Crete three times a day.

Both Talos and his dreams were embodied through an invented instrument called the ghostplate. This is a metallic instrument that Dafnis built and designed working with Tom Nunn, well known for the imaginative diversity of his own invented instruments. Dafnis himself played this instrument, joined by a quartet consisting of flutist Ellie Falaris Ganelin, oboist Kyle Bruckmann, violinist Ariel Wang, and cellist Lewis Patzner. The performance was further enhanced with projections of “natural” images, such as the following:

screen shot from the video of last night’s performance

If there was any shortcoming in the video, it was the lack of close-up shots of Dafnis performing his instrument. The sonorities were prodigiously diverse, reflecting as broad an array of dispositions as one might encounter in an eighteenth-century string quartet. Since Dafnis was his own composer, he also maintained a clear blend of all of that diversity with the more traditional sounds coming from the quartet.

Sadly, for those of us watching on YouTube, there was no information about the music itself. Indeed, it was only through Bandcamp that one could discover the eight-movement structure and the titles of each of those movements. Nevertheless, this was music in which sonority could override what might otherwise have been frustrating shortcomings.

Those shortcomings were more frustrating with the performance of the second premiere, Medea: Rebirth and Destruction. This was also a suite; but, in this case, each movement was by a different composer. The five of them, Nicole Jacobus, Nicole Rowe, Kristofer Twadell, Joshua Yee, and Justin Yeo, are all SFCM Composition students. Once again, the four instrumentalists were joined by Dafnis playing his ghostplate. The title was intended to reflect the fact that Medea’s sorcery was responsible for destroying Talos. However, apart from any evocations of Talos through Dafnis’ ghostplate, there was little about the music that captured the underlying narrative (or, for that matter, either drew or sustained the attention of the listener).