The Hellenic Project 2022-23 | The treasure of Panagiotis Toundas and the new rebetiko - Part B

The concert involves unknown and unreleased songs of the great Smyrna composer in their first ever performance, being recomposed, complemented and orchestrated by one of the contemporary greats of rebetiko, Manolis Pappos. Contemporary poets and lyricists lay words on unreleased tunes by Toundas, in a collaboration transposed in time and extending over a period of a century. Dionysis Kapsalis, Giorgos Koropoulis, Kostas Fasoulas, Dimitris Papadimitriou, and Veronica Davaki have contributed to the completion of the partially or totally missing lyrics.

Further, the concert includes the work by the tremendously young Evgenios Halil, entitled Small Pictures, presented to an audience for the first time. These are short instrumental pieces and songs endowed with lyrics by Christos Spourdalakis and selected from two different cycles of compositions.

As in the case of the first and highly successful concert with songs from the same cycle in the same venue in December of 2022, this material of Panagiotis Toundas is derived from drafts for prospective songs or melodies, or songs whose lyrics were never completed and so were left unreleased. Other materials never made it to the recording studio by force of circumstances. Nonetheless, the genius and signature style of the composer remains markedly and inescapably apparent within them.

Manolis Pappos is without doubt one of the leading bouzouki players of our times, one who perpetuates the innate expressive and aural qualities of the instrument in a time when the bouzouki is tipping into decline. His unostentatious yet magical skill, his measured aesthetic choices, his cultivation and deeply poetic nature rightly position him as the artist of first choice to be entrusted with the treasures of Toundas.

Remarking on Panagiotis Toundas, the founder and artistic director of the Hellenic Project Dimitris Papadimitriou notes: “P.T. is rightly considered one of the great composers of the Smyrna repertoire. Deeply knowledgeable of music theory, he has left us perfect, almost calligraphic scores featuring notation that is impressive for the genre. His successful experimentation with multimodal approaches to melody still blaze light – even today – into a particularly opaque area within Greek melodicism. Into a terrain that can only be tackled by composers of rare talent who boast a mastery of the form. And Toundas is genuinely that rare instance where a deep grasp of Western music did not destroy the natural Greek element within his music. Quite the contrary – it helped him in fact to expand it.”

These finds brought a rich seam of around 30 songs to light. Manolis Pappos in the main worked with a single sheet for each, containing only certain melodies and musical “responses,” minus even the chords. In rare instances, there existed piano and vocal parts for him to use, in which case there were chords in place too. Other times, there were only stray ideas to work with, bereft of any elaboration, and of course lacking lyrics. This series of unreleased Toundas pieces features a wide range of songs and ideas drawn from all three of his compositional periods. His first period – 1926-1933 – includes songs of the Smyrna School, which are rooted in the style prevalent in Asia Minor during the first two decades of the 20th century and which feature a fusion of European musical elements with the traditional Greek style. When it comes to this conceptual approach, Toundas proved pivotal in the development of the form. It is precisely during this period that he became more widely known among musicians and to the broader public, emerging as one of the best-loved and leading composers of the time. His second period, which roughly runs from 1934 through to 1937, is more clearly influenced by the rebetiko song tradition. Last in line is his 1937-1941 period, dominated by a purely laïkó approach in which the bouzouki takes on a starring role.

The songs featured in the concert are drawn from all three periods of the composer’s output, with a repertoire that includes easy-listening, Asia Minor – “café aman” (tavern), rebetiko, and folk songs, with some of them complete, both musically and lyrically, and others imaginatively completed using contemporary approaches to songwriting.

Regarding his work Small Pictures, Evgenios Halil notes: “These are short instrumental pieces and songs that were endowed with lyrics by Christos Spourdalakis. They were selected from two separate cycles of compositions that we have been working on lately.”

The first cycle was born out of a need to express interpersonal feelings, which materialize in the form of music and lyrics, so as to not fall into obscurity like letters never sent.

The second cycle recovers its theme from our agony to perceive and maintain our individuality intact within an everyday environment that increasingly suffocates us. As they progress towards completion, we realize that these are two complementary facets of our own internal mirroring…”

Regarding this commission to Evgenios Halil, Dimitris Papadimitriou notes: “The younger – in fact tremendously young – Evgenios Halil is an instrumentalist with a singular sound who strikes the vein of an impressive originality, only Halil is also a trained pianist and an ever restless musician who flirts with the alternative music zeitgeist, and this immediately makes us doubly excited and curious in our anticipation. The contradistinction between Vasilas and Halil is indicative of an ever-enigmatic present. But it also proves eloquent when set alongside the ‘new’ songs by Panagiotis Toundas. This cycle is in fact – by rights – a timeless yet historical fork in the road where three paths meet.”

And though Oedipus, at a crossroads, killed a man he did not know was his own father, we well know who our fathers are and, as such, shall respectfully let the wondrous carriage of Panagiotis Toundas pass – then follow in its wake on foot.

The Hellenic Project, with its choice of placing rebetiko and an according series of concerts at Mikro Pallas Theater in the center of this year’s artistic program, is designing its relaunching, to pick up from where the generation of Manos Hadjidakis left off, but heading off in new conceivable directions, seeking out old sources of intensity and truth in the present day. These are commissions of works fully aligned with the core of its philosophy, that is highlighting and promoting original musical output from both emerging and established composers.

All Hellenic Project actions and events are supported by the Onassis Foundation.