Yannis Ritsos, Tasos Leivaditis, Manolis Anagnostakis
Three poets, fighters for freedom through the music of Mikis Theodorakis
A programme with the “Mikis Theodorakis” Popular Orchestra, featuring songs by Mikis set to the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, Tasos Leivaditis and Manolis Anagnostakis. Songs of resistance and uprising, melodic and lyrical songs, songs of love, songs about a spring that never came, but also about “golden cities opening before us, bathed in truth and in radiant light.”
These are the songs of the cycles Epitaphios, Romiosyni and 18 Lianotragouda of the Bitter Homeland (poetry by Ritsos); Politeia, Exile, Lyrika, October ’78 (poetry by Leivaditis); Ballades, Exile and Arkadia VIII, which includes Miló and Haris — “songs that flow like a river” as Mikis himself called them — set to the poetry of Anagnostakis.
Like a modern-day Odysseus, the composer offers his music as a libation, calling forth the shadows of the poets, giving them form, allowing them to sing of struggle, suffering, betrayal, the death of ideals, but also of dreams, hope, love — everything that embodies the soul of Greekness in the entire post-war generation. Mikis Theodorakis’s work has played this role countless times before, and it can do so again now.
CO-PRODUCTION
Megaron the Athens Concert Hall
“Mikis Theodorakis” Popular Orchestra
