Theodoros Lotis

Époque de l’Eau gathers six works by Theodoros Lotis, composed between 1996 and 2002 in Ohain, at City University London and in his own studio. In his booklet essay Denis Smalley points to Lotis’s handling of spectral space: layers spread across registers, opaque basses suggesting broad expanses, luminous pulses and particles above, and gliding glissandi, with light, transparency and opacity as guiding ideas. The titles evoke water, wind, air and light, but the music moves towards an imagined elsewhere.

Arioso Dolente / Beethoven Op. 110, commissioned by the Amici della Musica di Cagliari, takes all its material from the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, recorded by Maria Metaxaki; the main theme appears in the middle, distant and stretched in time. It won 1st prize in the UK section of Jeu de temps / Times Play in 2003. A South Wind Will Bring the Sand uses granular synthesis to raise wind and drifting sand. Underwater Theories, prefaced by a passage from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, blends software synthesis with treated voice and double bass.

Sibylla’s Voice, commissioned by Musiques & Recherches and dedicated to Annette Vande Gorne, convolves violin with the voice of Eleni Mpratsou to evoke the ecstatic, hard-to-read oracles of the sibyls; it was written for eight channels and is heard here in stereo. Shadows follows the motion of shadows through glissandi and portamenti, after Heraclitus’ idea of opposed dualities. La mer, the earliest piece, dedicated to Martha, makes waves from the electronically treated hum of bees and light on the surface from a treated string quartet.

Born in Thessaloniki in 1967, Lotis studied guitar, flute, analysis and composition in Greece, Belgium and the UK, and completed a PhD at City University London. He won first prize at the L’Espace du son spatialisation competition in 2002 and lectures at the Ionian University in Corfu.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0894, 2008.