Exotica | Works for two pianos

This exotic program includes works bearing the distinct musical imprint of North and South America as well as the Near East.

Four short tangos make up Ástor Piazzolla’s “Suita Porteña de ballet”, their titles reminiscent of nocturnal snapshots: a dance, a dark alleyway, a cabaret, ships that pass in the night.

The French composer Darius Milhaud was especially influenced by the music of Piazzolla’s neighbor: Brazil. His immensely popular "Scaramouche", a playful, tender, exotic piece, combines incidental music he had composed earlier for the theater with a seductive samba.
“Divertimento” by the British polystylist composer and jazz pianist, Richard Rodney Bennett, brings together samba and the blues, ragtime and Sixties rock in a series of unforced encounters.

The American William Bolcom studied under Milhaud and Messiaen. Fascinated by ragtime, he employs this purely pianistic form of black music in his “Garden of Eden” suite, whose third part “The Serpent’s Kiss” will be receiving its Greek premiere. In it, the snake plays ragtime but also strives to seduce with tongue slaps to the palate and rhythmic motifs on the piano frame.

Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs” are memories of another America, and the cosmopolitan finesse of the New York “Plaza” hotel circa 1914—the original tango era. Barber was a regular visitor to the establishment, and tenderly recollects the era in music when it had passed into history.

For Christos Papageorgiou, “Choros” represents a challenge: combining different musical genres into a single work and arriving at a Pyrrichios by way of “inter alia a taksim" and a “zeimbekiko”, the work also poses a virtuosic challenge to its two performers.