Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 51 (1987)

Description:

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was completed in Athens in the spring of 1987. Although it is divided into three parts, with a cadenza before the end of the first part, it bears no relation to the traditional models of the genre.

As a form, it is based on three musical nuclei that, varied in many ways, sometimes recognisable and sometimes not, are heard throughout the duration of the work. This ensures unity and variety while simultaneously serving as starting or ending points of the individual structural elements either within the same part or throughout the whole piece.

However, each of the three parts of the work maintains its own identity, which is not due to a uniform rhythmic tempo for each part (where it exists, it is incidental) or different musical form, but to a distinctive musical expression that is in constant evolution depending on the treatment of the musical nuclei in terms of rhythm, melodic or harmonic patterns, and especially in terms of timbre, which here plays a decisive formative role.

-This is a near-verbatim translation of Sicilianos’s Greek text. The editor of On Music Elly Yotopoulou-Sicilianou excluded this programme note from the final publication but gave the manuscript to Anastasios R. A. Mavroudis.