Chamber music next to the waves

Festival on Aegina, featuring classical and Gypsy melodies, begins tonight and runs to September 2 with 10 concerts

Arecital by the Ellemis Piano Quartet of young musicians will inaugurate the Second International Music Festival of Aegina tonight on Avra Beach. Under the artistic direction of Dora Bakopoulou, the event features 10 classical music concerts of Greek and foreign music. And it all takes place right next to the sea.

The festival is mostly oriented toward chamber music, for which small ensembles of internationally acclaimed soloists will join forces to perform a wonderful selection of chamber music pieces, opening a dialogue between different generations of musicians and schools of musical theory.

Today at 9 p. m., Stella Tsani (on violin), Elena Hounda (piano), Mikhail Smirnov (viola) and Lefki Kolovou (cello) will perform Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, Mozart’s Piano Quartet and Schumann’s Quartet in E Flat Major.

Tomorrow, pianist Paulina Leschenko, cellist Christian Poltera and violinist Alissa Margulis will play Edvard Grieg’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Minor, Chopin’s Polonaise Brillante for Cello and Piano and Felix Mendelssohn’s Trio No 1 in D Minor.

One of the highlights of the event is on Sunday when Dora Bakopoulou (piano), Angelica Cathariou (mezzo-soprano), Loukas Georgas (piano), Christina Yiannakopoulou (soprano), Petros Stergiopoulos (flute) and Vangjel Nina (cello), will come together to perform Brahms’s “Zigeunerlieder,” Debussy’s “Syrinx,” Stathis Gyftakis’s “Five Poems by Costas Kariotakis” and Ravel’s “Ma Mere l’Oye” and “5 melodies populaires grecques.”

Cello soloist Anssi Karttunen will take the stage on Wednesday, August 22, with a recital of works by Giovanni Batista Vitali, Kaija Saariaho, Bach and Pablo Ortiz, while the following Friday is dedicated to Schumann and Brahms with a concert performed by Vladimir Sverdlov (piano), Margulis (violin), Lida Chen (viola), Bakopoulou (piano) and Dimitris Patras (cello).

Next weekend’s program will begin on Saturday evening with a recital by pianist Marios Kazas, soprano Maria Gouseti, clarinetist Spyros Mourikis and pianist Victoria Kiazimi of Debussy’s “L’Isle Joyeuse” and “Four Songs,” Faure’s “Impromptu No 1” and “Four Songs,” Prokofiev’s “Toccata” and Poulenc’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.

The concert on Sunday, August 26, features Noe Inui on the violin and will comprise works by Haydn, Shostakovich, Chopin, Massenet and Beethoven.

The last three concerts of the International Music Festival of Aegina will take place between August 31 and September 2, starting with an evening dedicated to Gypsy music with Geza Hosszu-Legocky & the 5 DeVils, who will also play the closing concert on September 2.

Saturday, September 1, features an evening of opera dedicated to the memory of Costas Paschalis and featuring arias by Verdi (from “La Traviata” and “Rigoletto”), Rossini (“L’Italiana in Algieri” and “The Barber of Seville”), Gounod (“Romeo et Juliette”), Offenbach (“Hoffmann’s Tales”), Saint-Saens (“Samson et Dalila”), Mozart (“Cosi Fan Tutte” and “Don Giovanni”), Tchaikovsky (“Eugene Onegin”) and Bizet (“Carmen”), performed by Sandra Silvio (soprano), Angelica Cathariou (mezzo-soprano), Sebastian Lagrave (tenor) and Haris Andrianos (baritone), accompanied by Dimitris Giakas on piano.

The International Music Festival of Aegina is organized by the City of Aegina and the Enastros non-profit organization.

Information is available on www. aeginamusicfestival. gr.