ORCHESTRA

Along with his work as a singer-songwriter, Alkinoos composes for orchestra, choir and chamber ensembles. His orchestral works have been performed in Russia (St. Petersburg, Glazunov Hall, 2009 and Petrozavodsk, Symphony Hall, 2011), Germany (Berlin Philharmonie, Kammermuziksaal, 2010), Greece (Athens Concert Hall, 2010) and Cyprus (Limassol, Rialto Theatre and Nicosia, Municipal Theatre of Strovolos, 2010).

Works include:


ATHYR, music for the ancient sleep

For Symphony Orchestra, Choir, Solo Singer, Cretan Lyra, Guitar and Traditional Percussion (2006, 2008)

Duration: 50 minutes

In the ancient cemetery of Keramikos in Athens, we find stone, olive trees and soil. On the rocks, we can read the names and some information about the lives of ordinary people who lived 2.500 years before our time. These are the main characters in this piece. Children, young warriors, virgins and grandmothers, recount their lives and deaths, the big incidents and small details of their time on earth.

In Athyr, along with the tombstone inscriptions, Alkinoos uses a poem by Sappho as well as Parodos from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.





The Time of the Unexpected Era


Miniatures for Poet, Chamber Orchestra and Choir (2010)

Duration (1st Part): 20 minutes

Τhis is music Alkinoos wrote inspired by his brother Linos Ioannidis' poetry. The main characters are two people, moving through a city landscape. No one knows if these two people are returning as souls in the places where they once lived or if they are alive, while at the same time, their city has become a ghost. Throughout the work, there is a time difference between the two wanderers and the place they’re in. The action gives us the illusion of an infinite repetition into a time past. Gardens, women, baths, athletes, courts, bridges, statues, churches, avenues, swimmers and triumphal arches create the scenery of a tour into lost time, the submerged city, the "water’s deepest parts".

This work, in three parts, is still being composed. Its 1st part is often performed as a work in progress.


Bacchae

For String Orchestra, Gaida (Balkan Bagpipes), Daouli (Traditional Percussion) and Choir (2011)

Duration: 40 minutes

Music for Euripides' tragedy Bacchae, for the 2011 summer production of the Theatrical Organization of Cyprus, directed by Italian director Paolo Baiocco. A fight between the Western, harmonic, lyrical, cerebral power of Apollo, represented here by the strings, and the Eastern, anarchic, sexual, brutal powers of Dionysus, as performed by the traditional instruments.


Talando


Symphonic poem, for Symphony Orchestra, Talando and Solo Singer (2005)

Duration: 4 minutes

Alkinoos' first symphonic work, composed in 2001, at Mount Athos Monasteries, which he has visited often, to take Byzantine Music lessons by the monks. This piece delineates the break of the new day, the awakening of nature and the monks, the light that breaks through darkness. Talando is a wooden percussion instrument used in Greek Orthodox monasteries as an alarm clock. Its characteristic rhythmical riff wakes up the monks before dawn so that they get ready for morning church.


Europe's Abduction


Duration: 7 minutes

This piece was initially composed for big orchestras, then re-orchestrated for a smaller ensemble, to be performed at the Small Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus by the Absolute Ensemble of New York. It formed part of the project "Absolutely Greek to me" that Alkinoos, along with violinist Miltiades Papastamou and conductor Christjan Jarvi put together in 2010.


St. George's Song


For Cretan Lyra, Lute, Solo Singer, Symphony Orchestra and Choir (2004).

A revision of the medieval, traditional song of Cyprus, narrating the story of St. George. 

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