"Liszt’s score is perfect for youth orchestras. Because it has to glow, blaze, flicker, in short, it has to be played with pathos, as the ancient Greek word for passion reads. It is precisely this fire that burns in the hearts of the young talents, and Dionysis Grammenos knows how to unleash it in such a way that the music literally jumps out at the audience – without blurring the colors of the sound painting".
Thank you Tagesspiegel and Frederik Hanssen.Read below the full English translation of the article as posted on www.globalhappenings.com
"Greek guests at Young Euro Classic: All hell is breaking loose in Hellas"
You shouldn’t joke about names – but raving is allowed. On Friday, when the Greek Youth Symphony Orchestra performs at Gendarmenmarkt, Dionysis leads the baton and Achilles blows the trombone. It’s fantastic how alive antiquity is in Hellas, how naturally parents name their offspring after gods and heroes.
The festival
The youth orchestra meeting “Young Euro Classic” runs until August 27th in the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt.Today is Sunday’s “Next Generation” children’s day, and the National Youth Orchestra of Romania will be performing at 8 p.m.
After the acclaimed Berlin debut two years ago, the young orchestra from Athens, which was only founded in 2017, is a guest at Young Euro Classic for the second time. However, there are no Greek composers on the programme. Nothing sounds from the national saint Mikis Theodorakis, the most important avant-garde artist Iannis Xenakis is not there either.
The Greek Youth Symphony Orchestra was conducted at Young Euro Classic by its founder and conductor Dionysis Grammenos.© Kai Bienert
Instead, there is a symphony by his cousin Brahms, a rarity by Franziskos Liszt and an equally unknown piece by the Dane Launy Grondahl, whose first name cannot be Greekized with the best will in the world. As an encore, Maestro Grammenos then donates Wagner’s prelude to the third act of “Lohengrin”.
In the fully occupied concert hall, Deutschlandradio director Stefan Raue, as godfather of the evening, recalls how the Greek Symphony Orchestra triumphed in Berlin in 2021 with Beethoven’s “Eroica”. After the death of the titan of Viennese classicism, composers struggled with the symphony genre, which Ludwig van had brought to daunting perfection – just as the ancient Greeks did with the art of sculpting blocks of marble.
Johannes Brahms was so intimidated by the giant he always heard marching behind him that he struggled with his First Symphony for more than two decades. Franz Liszt, on the other hand, daringly designed a new genre, the “symphonic poem”, which throws overboard the principle that music is “absolute”. Instead, concrete stories should now be retold using musical means.
Blazing passion
For example, that of Prometheus, who in Greek mythology brings fire to people – and thus civilization. Zeus, the father of the gods, brutally punished this act: chained to a rock, Prometheus had to endure the torment that an eagle ripped out his liver, which then constantly formed anew.
Liszt’s score is perfect for youth orchestras. Because it has to glow, blaze, flicker, in short, it has to be played with pathos, as the ancient Greek word for passion reads. It is precisely this fire that burns in the hearts of the young talents, and Dionysis Grammenos knows how to unleash it in such a way that the music literally jumps out at the audience – without blurring the colors of the sound painting.
Trumpet charm offensive
His conducting style is as far removed from any lectern lion demeanor, the adjective “expedient” comes to mind the longer you watch him. But he must have rehearsed fantastically. Even in Brahms’ complex “First”, the musicians always know exactly where the music is headed and what holds it together at its core.
Beautiful sound and concentration are combined here with unconditional devotion to an interpretative intensity that is rarely heard in the works of the romantic from Hamburg. The fact that the symphony has only four movements and not five acts is the only thing that separates this performance from the ancient tragedy. If you take the volume of the applause as a benchmark, the audience definitely experienced a catharsis here, a “purification of the soul” that Aristotle had hoped for from the experience of art 2,300 years ago.
Between the two powerful romantics there is a charm offensive on Friday: the incredibly likeable Achilles Liarmakopoulos shows as a soloist in Launy Grondahl’s 1924 wonderfully witty trombone concerto how versatile his instrument can sound: not only blaring or shiny golden, but also enchantingly soft as butter.
The concert of the GYSO at Konzerthaus Berlin on 11.08.2023 was part of the international festival @youngeuroclassic.
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