Alternative Stage Founding Donor
Major Sponsor of the Greek National Opera
The Contemporary Music Days festival, curated by composer Ioannis Angelakis, brings to the Alternative Stage an unprecedented - by Greek standards - lineup of eighteen concerts, including six new commissions from Greek composers and a multitude of premieres and reruns. This diverse programme titled Multiple Presents maps contemporary musical creation, spanning from acoustic and electronic music to hybrid and stage works, through the coexistence of renowned ensembles and artists, newly formed groups, and emerging soloists and composers.
Contemporary Music Days was born out of a dual need: on the one hand, to create a steady place dedicated to contemporary musical creation, and on the other, to reexamine what contemporary means today. It was not meant to signal a mere time category but to serve as a way to relate to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries: to modernism, the avant-garde, ruptures, and continuities that still shape our experience of sound. In this line of thinking, the Contemporary Music Days festival does not propose a single aesthetic or a linear narrative but rather an open field of coexistence in which different readings of the past and present are continually recaptured. Special emphasis will be placed on tributes to György Kurtág (marking his 100th anniversary), Georges Aperghis (celebrating his 80th anniversary), and György Ligeti (commemorating the 20th anniversary of his death), which bring emblematic works of contemporary music back to the foreground, not as historical references but as contemporary touchstones from which the new commissions draw material, inspiration, and artistic vision. The collaborations with the ERT Choir and the Greek Composers' Union enhance the logic of an expanded ecosystem in which contemporary music is shaped by networks of people, ensembles, and institutions, notes Ioannis Angelakis.
