Symphony No.2 "Song of Earth" - Mikis Theodorakis

Orchestre Symphonique de RTL conducted by Mikis Theodorakis

I - Andante - Andante moderato - Andante cantabile - Allegro marcato - Andante: 0:00
II - Presto - Adagio - Vivace - Adagio - Andante sostenuto: 18:13
III - Andante - Andante cantabile - Lento - (attacca): 32:17
IV - Finale. Presto - Adagio - Dolce: 47:59

The Second Symphony of Mikis Theodorakis was composed between 1980 and 1982, which started what he says is his fourth period in his writing: representing a return to the symphonic music, while still composing song-cycles.The work was first performed on 8 February 1982, with Cyprien Katsaris and the Orchestra of Halle (GDR), under the baton of Olaf Koch.

After his 1959 triumph at London’s Covent Garden with his ballet Antigone, Theodorakis did an about-face, abandoned “classical” composition and returned to his own country. Here he sparked off a “cultural revolution”, with his song-cycles based on poems by the greatest contemporary Greek authors (Ritsos, Seferis, Elytis, Christodoulou, Livatidis…). He became the spokesman of a generation that sought radical change in Greece. The ultimate and fatal consequence of this upheaval was to be the colonels’ coup d’état on 21 April 1967. Theodorakis, hunted, imprisoned, deported, exiled in Paris, became the incarnation of resistance to the dictatorship. After his triumphant return to Greece in 1974, however, he became so disillusioned that in 1980, he once more left for voluntary exile in Paris, where he returned to his symphonic writing.

The work is actually a fusion of the Suite No.1 for piano and orchestra and the music for the ballet Antigone, thus creating the second symphony of orchestra, children's choir and solo piano. The Suite and the Antigone ballet are two works “of which I think the first was too strictly ‘Dionysian’ and the second exclusively ‘Apollonian’, to use the Nietzschian terms. Achieving a balance between these two elements was the only way I could turn them into one work that was complete, finished, that is to say, which expresses the whole range and breadth of human emotions and all the complexity of a march through time.”

The first movement begins with a meditative introduction, which takes up the initial theme of Antigone and Haemon. The piano enters and proceeds to determine the evolution of the movement; the woodwind, brass and percussion create a high degree of rhythmic tension until the flute comes in with a new plaintive motif. Anxiety predominates until the movement finally concludes with a powerful choral melody.

The second movement is based on the opening movement of the Suite, and places the percussion in the foreground. Its density increases, inextricably mixing elements of the Suite with parts of the Ballet to create a fresh entity, which at the same time constitutes a new ethical vision.

The third movement is the most complex and begins as a dance, hardly surprising, as it is based on the Antigone ballet. It progresses gradually towards a lied that first appears in the oboe and strings; this too has its origins in the ballet, as does the passage that constitutes the work’s lyrical highpoint: over faint chords in the strings, the children intone the ultimate “Song of the Earth,” for which Theodorakis himself wrote the text. The catastrophic vision being depicted is given concrete form in the final section of the movement. His orchestration, at once spectacular and harrowing, expresses the race towards destruction that is the symphony’s main theme.

To evocative Cretan rhythms, the Finale brings together the last two movements of the Suite. As in the opening movement, the solo piano plays an important role in propelling this dance on the edge of the abyss towards its paroxysm. However, Theodorakis does not want to end on an impression of catastrophe and nothingness. He therefore adds a faint glimmer of hope: accompanied by a delicately constructed chord, the piano makes a solo entry with an contemplative melody of great intensity, a Byzantine hymn which is transformed into a hymn to life (a questioning one, it is true) that the woodwind in meditative mood take up and lead on into silence: Thus, as at the end of a classical tragedy, le composer resorts to an “exodus”.

Picture: "On Gustav Mahler: The Song of Earth" by the American painter Gerald Wartofsky.

Sources: http://mikis-theodorakis.org/index.ph...