Vassilis Tsabropoulos
Akroasis

Vassilis Tsabropoulos: piano

ECM 1737 CD 0 440 067435-2 3 Release: April 2003

Vassilis Tsabropoulos, in his first solo album for ECM, draws upon some of his homeland’s oldest music. The five hymns included on “Akroasis” were composed almost two thousand years ago. The Athens-born pianist explains that “the hymns have always been sung in the Orthodox churches at Easter time, and though they’re very well known – almost all Greeks know this music - they’re rarely heard outside a religious context. But I started on this project with the feeling that Byzantine music is really the core of the ancient Greek music. It is our root and I’d long had the idea to cast it in a new light, to play it with a new approach. I didn’t want to change its character – and of course I didn’t want to make ‘jazz’ out of it, but simply to play it with more lyricism, more pianistically, more like an improvised music. I felt it was music that should be heard by more people. It has a timeless essence and expressive simplicity that can speak to any listener, not only the devout.”

In his liner notes for “Akroasis”, Tsabropoulos describes the music on the recording as “a polychromatic mosaic. The musical text is developed in broad phrases, which are repeated in the manner, one might say, of fixed periods, sometimes in the original form, sometimes with pianistic variations. Despite this repetition, characteristic of Byzantine composition, the interweaving of the modes and melodic lines leads to frequent leaps which are underlined, for example, by the conclusion of one musical passage in the fourth mode and the beginning of the next an octave higher.”

The five hymns – “Axion Esti”, “Zoi en tafo”, “Ek nyktos”, “Nymphios” and “Anastasis” – are augmented by three of Tsabropoulos’s own pieces – “The Secret Garden”, “Interlude” and “Prayer” - which are inspired and influenced by the Byzantine material.

Tsabropoulos’s career has had, as he acknowledges, a strange trajectory. Trained from an early age as a classical pianist, he still considers himself “95% a classical musician”. It was while he was studying at Juilliard (where his teachers included Rudolf Serkin and Tatyana Nikolayeva), that he first began to improvise. “My professors discouraged me from doing so – they warned me that my touch would be damaged, but I felt I needed it as another way to express myself.” He was encouraged in his experiments by Chick Corea who heard his playing on a visit to the Academy. Back in Greece he began to further develop his improvisational skills…

The pianist came to the attention of ECM via Arild Andersen. The Norwegian bassist first encountered Tsabropoulos in Athens in 1996, while playing in Greece in diverse combinations with Markus Stockhausen. “What struck me straight away“, Andersen says, “was the fact that his exceptional classical technique never got in the way of his feeling for improvisation. This is very unusual. And I liked very much the fact that his improvising is generally not chordally based. He’s more often playing independent lines in the left hand.” Tsabropoulos subsequently toured with Andersen in the band of electronic composer Vangelis Katsoulis. By chance ECM producer Manfred Eicher was also in Greece at the time and he and Andersen discussed a recording project with Vassilis. In this way, the trio with Andersen, Tsabropoulos and drummer John Marshall was born. Reviewing their ECM disc “Achirana” Ian Carr wrote in the BBC Music Magazine that “This album contains one element completely new to my experience. Tsabropoulos, a protégé of Vladimir Ashkenazy, is the first classical pianist I’ve ever heard who can play jazz with real understanding and great imagination.”

The Tsabropoulos/Andersen/Marshall trio continues to tour, and recorded a new album earlier this year (scheduled for release in 2004). Tsabropoulos also gives improvised solos concerts and recently launched a new duo with Rosamunde Quartet cellist Anja Lechner: their repertoire currently includes composed music from the classical tradition and improvisation, as well as pieces by Tsabropoulos and duo settings of the Byzantine hymns.

Where classical performance is concerned, Tsabropoulos has made the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann central references in his performance repertoire, but he is also a committed advocate of Russian music, frequently playing works of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin. Vassilis Tsabropoulos has composed works for orchestra, a piano concerto, string quartets, music for violin and cello and many solo piano works including the “Preludes” which he wrote for Vladimir Ashkenazy. The association with Ashkenazy continues, and Tsabropoulos has been working with the conductor and the London Philharmonia in performances of the Rachmaninoff piano concertos.

The Vassilis Tsabropoulos/Anja Lechner duo tours Germany and Austria in June with a programme that will include material from “Akroasis.” He is also preparing orchestral settings of the Byzantine hymns.

For further information on Vassilis Tsabropoulos, consult his web site at www.tsabropoulos.gr.