A festival for Hadjidakis is inaugurated in the composer’s hometown
A new festival, dedicated to the music of Manos Hadjidakis, is being inaugurated at the composer’s birthplace of Xanthi in northern Greece. The Manos Hadjidakis Festival is an outgrowth of the Hadzidakeio Festival, a smaller event which the Municipality of Xanthi has sponsored each year for the past decade. The new festival, which will kick off on Saturday and will run to December 11, is to feature a variety of events involving well-known artists. The initiative belongs to the House of Letters and Fine Arts of Xanthi Municipality, in collaboration with creative group Media dell’Arte. The Manos Hadjidakis Festival is hoping to attract and promote the latest productions of arthouse Greek music and to shed light on the historical buildings of the old city of Xanthi with a series of events including concerts, exhibitions, screenings and performances. Most of these will take place at the House’s amphitheater. The two-week festival will bring life to old tobacco warehouses, old villas, cobbled streets and squares, through the invited works of acclaimed artists. On opening day, Saturday, Xanthi-based music act Ektos Orion will present «Gioconda’s Smile.» On Monday, November 28, singer Martha Frintzila and act Walter Testa will interpret traditional, rebetiko, Balkan, European and American songs, while on the same day funky act Mode Plagal will present their version of Greek fusion jazz. The following day, Elli Paspala will sing Hadjidakis favorites, orchestrated by David Lynch. On December 2, Athos Danellis’s Athens Shadow Theater will unveil a work-reference to Manos Hadjidakis with a live orchestra, and the next day Thessaloniki-based band En Hordais will join forces with Turkish percussionist Misirli Achmet for a concert of traditional music from Smyrna, northern Greece and more. On December 4, songwriter Socrates Malamas will present his new album «The Empty Room» and other hits with his band and singer Maria Louka. Throughout the concerts, the House of Letters and Fine Arts is holding choral meetings in the festival’s context, narrated by actress Filareti Komninou.
