On Monday July 17 2012, flutist Laura Falzon together with vocalist Natassa Mare Moumtzidou, double bassist Agamemnon Mardas and percussionist Stelios Romanidis performed the world premiere of Nickos Harizanos’ Medea Sparagmata op.135 at the Megaron Hall in Thessaloniki, Greece.
This project was the result of a collaboration between the US based Id-Dinja ensemble and the Greek, Xenakis founded, Contemporary Music Research Centre KSYME, based in Athens, Greece.
Medea Sparagmata by Greek composer Nickos Harizanos, a member of the Xenakis founded Contemporary Music Research Centre (KSYME) in Athens and Director of the KSYMEnsemble, is a 45 minute music-theatre work for voice, flute, double bass, percussion, video projection and electronics, with lyrics from Euripedes’s Medea, utilizes elements of the ancient voice metric, polymodal (polytropic) harmony and many extended techniques on the Flute. Interludes of free improvisation provide contrast between unpredictability and stability, imparting an unworldly character to the piece. Medea as a heroin is cast as aesthetically superior. Her cultural presence moving beyond her immediate being, representing the dense and often paradoxical expressions of our collective forms of representation. As a symbol, Medea embodies a collective unconscious – she carries the unconscious psyche of humanity. The voice, representing fragments embodied in this collective unconscious, becomes a coded imprint of the history of the world.