“Tinos World Music Festival”: Pre-festival concert at the Onassis Stegi

The pre-festival concert of “Tinos World Music Festival” will be at the Onassis Stegi Upper Stage on Thursday June 1, the eve of the festival, featuring Enver Izmaylov, the Antonis Apergis quartet, and Vahan Galstyan playing with Lefteris Havoutsas.

The Tinos World Music Festival will this year be honouring the world's most popular, familiar and widely played musical instrument, the accompaniment for centuries now to mankind's more lyric moments. As it is every year, the 5th annual Festival will be held in Chora over the long weekend of the feast of the Holy Spirit, 2-4 June.

Classical or acoustic, electric or fretless, with six, eight or even ten and more strings, the guitar is generally associated with Western music classical and modern. But for decades now, it has had an important role to play in traditional, non-Western musical contexts, too. It is this less well-known aspect of the guitar that the musicians invited to this year's Tinos World Music Festival will be spotlighting through their wide-ranging musical quests and approaches.

Performers will include the internationally celebrated, multiple award-winning Ukrainian soloist Enver Izmaylov, whose unique technique and improvisational style reveals the “polyphonic” qualities of the guitar; the distinguished Armenian duduk soloist Galstyan Vahan, who will be joining forces with the guitarist Lefteris Havoutsas to present an authentic but original homage to Armenian traditional music; and Antonis Apergis (electric and fretless guitar) with his quartet in compositions which bring together a host of folk idioms from Greece, the Arab World and everywhere in between.