Voices of Greece at the Festival of Chichester

SussexWorld

Sunday, July 6, 7pm Event M34: REBETIKI SERENATA: VOICES OF GREECE, St Paul's Church, Churchside, Chichester, PO19 6FT.  Join Pavlos Carvalho and Greek folk group Plastikes Karekles for a night of traditional Greek Rebetiko music. Guitar, bouzouki, baglama and evocative singing treat you to soulful melodies, foot-tapping grooves that take you to the heart of Greece. Music by Vamvakaris, Tsitsanis, Mitsakis, Skarvelis and more. Tickets £15, Under 18s/Students £8, children under 5 free.

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers and also

00:05Chairman of the Festival of Chichester. And for the last, well, however many years,

00:10Pavlos Carvalho has been absolutely essential, absolutely central to our festival, and we're

00:15delighted to say that. Now you're back with three concerts this year at the Festival of Chichester.

00:21Now the second, Sunday July the 6th at 7pm, Voices of Greece at St Paul's Church in Chichester.

00:28Tell me about that concert.

00:33So, on the 6th of July, 5th of July, sorry, on the 6th of July, Sunday the 6th of July,

00:42we're coming with a quartet version of our Greek group Plastikes Kareklis, which is sort of moldable,

00:50sometimes with three players, sometimes with six, seven, eight. In this situation we're coming with

00:54four. And we're playing a program of music, which is called Rebetico music. Rebetico music

01:03is sometimes likened to the blues, not because it sounds like the blues, it doesn't really sound like

01:08those, but it comes from similar origins from people regarded as outcasts of society. It was seen as

01:14music that was played by the lower classes. And as the centuries passed, of course, musicians and the

01:21wider music world realized its value and its influence on contemporary music in the same

01:26way that blues influenced jazz, the same way Rebetico music has influenced Greek music ever

01:32since the 1920s. It's really interesting music because it's the reason it's so universally loved

01:38and has lasted so long is because it always talks about issues that are relevant to us today, about,

01:46well, issues of war, issues about loss, issues of birth, issues of betrayal, love, hate, food,

01:58relationships between you and your mother-in-law, everything. And some of it can be very sorrowful music,

02:05but underlying that is a great joy, a way of expressing or having, getting this sorrow out

02:11through, through music. But also there's a lot of humorous music because it deals with every aspect

02:16of relationship you can possibly think of in Greece. Music, musically it's very interesting because it

02:21has its roots through its modal music and the way that the singer would deliver it into Byzantine music

02:27and the makams of the Arabic world as well. So you have this sort of melting pot of different cultures

02:35that emerge through Greek music, north, west, south and east. It's very interesting. In our program,

02:41you will hear some music that is influenced more from the, from the Turkish side of music,

02:48which is much more modal because Greece, of course, for 400 years was occupied by the Ottomans,

02:54apart from the west side. And so you'll hear some music of this, which was occupied by the,

02:59by the Venetians, which is much more mandolin style music and much more like Italian Serenata music,

03:07which is where our Arabic Serenata title comes from. So you have this rich, rich combination of

03:13influences. Also, we have influences from American swing, where musicians went to the US and came back

03:18and brought these jazz influences from Latin America. And so you have all these lovely influences,

03:24and yet it remains uniquely Greek in spirit, in lyrics. And of course, with the sound of the bazookis,

03:30because we're coming with two bazookis, guitar and voice, female and male voice.

03:35It sounds fantastic. Looking forward to it very much indeed. Thank you.

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