Dimitri Terzakis

Five works by the Greek composer Dimitri Terzakis, written between 1988 and 2009. Four of them draw on literature: Sappho, Baudelaire, the Bible and Dante. Terzakis returned to the tonal system of ancient Greece and found in it ways of shaping melody beyond major and minor, with micro-intervals, sliding pitches and the finest dynamic nuances.

Terzakis was born in Athens in 1938. He studied there with Yannis Papaioannou and then in Cologne in the composition class of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and has lived in Germany for about half a century. From 1994 he held the chair of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in Leipzig. The performers include the narrators Brigitte Fassbaender and Ute Loeck, soprano Antigone Papoulkas, violinists Karla Beyer, Lucie Leker and Kolja Lessing, and violist Tatjana Masurenko. The Thomanerchor Leipzig under Georg Christoph Biller and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester under Ulf Schirmer also take part. The recordings come from the Stuttgart Musikhochschule, MDR, BR and WDR.

The programme opens with Legetos (1988) for two violins, whose two-voice linearity and spatial effects give a direct view of Terzakis's sound world. The Sappho-Zyklus (2006), for narrator, soprano, flute, viola and piano, sets a number of fragments by the ancient poet and closes with a complete poem discovered only recently. À une Madone (2007), for violin and chamber orchestra, reflects Baudelaire's poem from Les Fleurs du mal. It is not programme music but a rendering of the poem's atmosphere, which alternates eroticism and the demonic.

Visionen (2004), subtitled Die Schalen des Zorns (The Bowls of Wrath), is for mixed choir with a solo viola ad libitum, and adds a narrator to the choir. This combination of choir, speaking voice and a single viola makes it the most unusual work here in terms of sound. The Sonate infernale (2008-09) for violin and piano refers to Dante's Divine Comedy, which has drawn many composers before. Here Terzakis chose the traditional genre of the violin sonata and opened it into new ways of shaping sound as dialogue. At nearly twenty minutes, the Sappho cycle is the longest work on the disc.

CD, Wergo WER 7331 2, released in 2016.