Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos has been a member of the Wandelweiser composers collective since 2003. He pursues his own compositional style to create a new kind of tonal music, deeply associated with his individuality and the surroundings of his life in Athens, a unique blend of stoic minimalism, the warm colors of modern romanticism, and the introspective depth of Zen.
"For many years I have concentrated my attention on modal monophonic melodies. In my pieces I want to bring a balance between western and eastern musical traditions, but also between remote past and present. This balance is subjective. I care a lot to find a connectedness between the tones of the melodies. The deeper the connectedness I gradually find, the more simple and plain seems the melody." (Anastassis Philippakopoulos)
‘wind and light’ consists of four solo clarinet pieces and three solo piano pieces written by Philippakopoulos, inspired by nature in Greece. The clarinet pieces were performed by Swiss composer/clarinetist Jürg Frey, recorded in Athens in 2016, and the piano pieces were performed by Philippakopoulos himself, recorded in Athens in 2019 to complete this album.
“When I was listening to the seven pieces together, I experienced this feeling of ‘landscape/bell in a distance'. I hear the clarinet as the breath of a human being, and the piano as the sounds in the landscape I hear from a distance. This duality opens a wide space, and I was really surprised when I listened to this for the first time, because I didn't expect something like that in the context of an album, a poetic relationship between the human and the landscape.” (Jürg Frey)
Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos has been a member of the Wandelweiser composers collective since 2003. He pursues his own compositional style to create a new kind of tonal music, deeply associated with his individuality and the surroundings of his life in Athens, which is a unique blend of stoic minimalism, the warm colors of modern romanticism, and the introspective depth of Zen.
In Philippakopoulos' piano works, each tone is closely connected with the previous and the subsequent tones via long resonances, forming a simple yet poignant melody that contains a magnetic power to draw the listener’s ears. The intensity of a single tone of his piano pieces often evokes a beautiful stone, organically formed over the course of a very long time. In fact, Philippakopoulos takes several months to a year to compose one short 2-4 minute piece.
On this album, Philippakopoulos' twelve solo piano pieces (composed from 2005-2018) are performed by a rising French composer/pianist Melaine Dalibert, who is known for a unique algorithmic compositional style as well as his interpretations of works by Giuliano D’Angiolini, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland, and many others. Here Dalibert realized the transient, meditative beauty of Philippakopoulos' piano works by inducing rich harmonics in the tranquil afterglows mysteriously tinged with shadows, brilliantly conveying the immense and profound world of Philippakopoulos' music narratively and poetically.
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compositions by Anastassis Philippakopoulos
piano by Melaine Dalibert