Eleni Karaindrou, Kim Kashkashian, Jan Garbarek, Vangelis Christopoulos

Concert in Athens captures Eleni Karaindrou's return to the Athens Concert Hall in November 2010, five years after the concert released as Elegy of the Uprooting. It is her tenth ECM release and brings together two guests who have shaped her music on record, the violist Kim Kashkashian and the saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Alongside film themes for Theo Angelopoulos, it gathers theatre music, much of it new to CD, which gives the album a wider emotional range than her film collections.

The concert took place on 19 November 2010 in the Megaron (Hall of the Friends of Music). Karaindrou plays piano on several pieces, and the oboist Vangelis Christopoulos stands out among her soloists, with accordion, harp, mandolin and cello among the other colours. The string orchestra is the Camerata Orchestra under Alexandros Myrat. Manfred Eicher was artistic director and producer, and he edited and mixed the recording with engineer Nikos Espialidis in March 2012.

The programme is framed by the Requiem for Willy Loman, written for Jules Dassin's production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, with Garbarek's dark tenor over piano and strings at the start and in a variation at the end. Music for productions of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? follows, and Kashkashian carries Laura's Waltz and the concert piece Closed Roads. Short pieces from the television series Number Ten, after the novel by M. Karagatsis, bring accordion and a tango into the mix. The film side includes the Farewell Theme from The Beekeeper, once recorded with Garbarek on Music for Films, and the Dance from Ulysses' Gaze, where Kashkashian returns to music she first recorded for that score.

Critics singled out the viola and the recorded sound. Graham Rickson of theartsdesk praised music that "always moves, seems to be going somewhere and has something definite to say," and admitted to replaying the Dance endlessly. The Australian critic John Shand wrote of Kashkashian, "If anyone makes a better noise on a viola I should love to hear them." Dominy Clements in MusicWeb International was more cautious about the massed strings but found the soloists cleanly balanced.

CD, ECM New Series 2220, released on 25 January 2013, with liner notes by the composer.