Composer Nick Tsiavos is set to dazzle audiences with a concert titled ‘Akathistos (Ακάθιστος) Fragments’ which sees a daring combination of styles between the ancient chants of church and the contemporary forces of rock, jazz and ‘classical music’.
Tsiavos and his bandmates will perform their concert at Primrose Potter Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre on Tuesday 2 May at 7pm as part of the Centre’s second season called ‘Immersion’.
The performance represents a fusion of styles emblematic of the artist’s wide interest in music itself.
“Looking back over my work the past thirty years or so, I note that apparently disparate threads of interest have woven themselves into a core of ideas that define my performance and compositional language, and perhaps also, at some level, define me,” the bassist told Neos Kosmos.
Mr Tsiavos‘ experiences of attending church and listening to the popular contemporary music greatly inspired him on this concert.
“The potency and beauty of ancient sacred chant, both Medieval and Byzantine, has always fascinated me. My earliest musical memories are of listening to the chant in Greek Orthodox churches,” the composer said.
“These memories were soon overwritten by stronger forces in contemporary culture; rock, jazz and what is quaintly called ‘classical music’.”
The concert itself was conceived by Mr Tsiavos in the mid-1990s when he was working in Orange and was comparing the “poor academic publication of the Akathistos against the even more unreliable memory I had of hearing parts of it at church during Easter”.
“I thought I would explore fragmentary aspects of the work, especially the Hairetismoi (Χαιρετισμοί) and see where my explorations might take me. My initial fragment ended up being 15 minutes long and I started to insert it into the group’s programming,” Mr Tsiavos said.
Some years later, the bassist turned the work which initially started as a band piece into a standalone experience that he then recorded for ABC Classics in 2004.
These personal experiences invited an in-depth perspective for which Mr Tsiavos investigated in his creative space.
“These genres were viewed by me as avenues to be travelled upon, explored critically, and drawn into a cartography of ideas that would both inform and propel my work, as well as placing it within a greater contextual framework,” Tsiavos told Neos Kosmos.
“The passion and depth of meaning in ancient sacred text; the instability, energy and structural possibility of rock, jazz and modern art music; the stillness and static tension within minimalism and Zen, all underpinned by the restless anima of improvisation, have become increasingly understood by myself as my own lingua franca.”
Such is the experimental nature of the composer that he himself struggles to properly subscribe to a specific genre or style, instead simply referring to it as ‘art music’.
Tsiavos will be joined by his band which includes Deborah Kayser, Jerzy Kozlowski, Peter Neville and Anne Norman, all of whom he has long, deep relationships with.
“Peter and I have been collaborating for over 40 years. We both went to Vic College of the Arts and just continued. We brought Anne into the fray whilst recording a disc in 1991. Deb joined the group in 1998 (and is my partner) and Jerzy started with us in the early 2000s,” Mr Tsiavos said.
The concert represents a reunion of sorts for the band as all five original performers on the record will be together in ten years, adding further intrigue to what promises to be a dynamic show.
Tickets can be purchased online at www.melbournerecital.com.au/events/2023/akathistos-frag
