The Intercultural Orchestra continues its journey across world music and further enriches its palette of traditions, styles and timbres. Having evolved into a high-class orchestra from 2018 to this day, this year too, it will create new musical experiences with the steady goal of bringing out music as a language of communication and connection among people. In this year’s season, the orchestra acquires new members and expands its exploration to an even greater gamut of musical traditions. Moreover, it confirms its participation in Greek National Opera’s Sacred Music Festival and will bid 2023 farewell with a singular concert on Tuesday 19 December 2023 at Parnassos Literary Society.

Orchestra conductor: Harris Lambrakis

Rehearsals start on: Monday 9 October

Day & hours of rehearsals: Mondays, 18.00-21.00

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

The GNO Learning & Participation Department continues for one more year its music, dance, and movement workshops in even more penitentiaries across Greece. These workshops are organized with the goal of promoting the importance of artistic education and contact with the arts in penitentiaries and enhancing the participants’ creativity and free expression. In this season, the workshops will be realized with the support of the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation in the Female Penitentiary of Eleonas in Thebes, the Male Wing of Korydallos Penitentiary I, the Special Youth Detention Centers in Avlonas and Volos and the Penitentiary of Chania. After a series of weekly meetings, each of these workshops will come complete with the presentation of the artistic result of each creative trajectory.

Music Workshops in the Male Wing of Korydallos Penitentiary I

Through improvisation, participants will experiment with sound and music, develop performance skills and co-create new compositions. The workshop’s main goal is to cultivate creativity, group spirit and free expression. It will come complete with a concert, in which participants themselves will perform their own music pieces.

Planning / Implementation: Maria-Christina Harper (composer/music therapist), Andreas Gyftakis (musician)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Music Workshop in the Penitentiary of Chania

Using strings and percussion, participants will embark on a journey across the traditional folk music of the wider Mediterranean region. Through a melodic wandering across their homelands they will remember, converse and work collectively. The workshop’s main goal is to cultivate communication, creativity, team spirit and free expression, as well as to enhance the contact with the participants’ roots. It will come complete with a concert given with the participation of the workshop’s members.

Planning/Implementation: Giannis Papatzanis (musician), Stelios Sykakis (musician)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Female Penitentiary of Eleonas in Thebes

Participants will be invited to activate their bodies and develop their creativity, work as a team and interact with each other, but also to explore dance as a way to bring joy and well-being, and unleash expression. The workshop will come complete with the presentation of a single dance-theatre performance, which will result from the blend of the original choreographies that will be co-created by the participants through guided physical exercises.  

Planning/Implementation: Katerina Spyropoulou (dancer, choreographer), Margarita Trikka (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Special Youth Detention Center in Avlonas

Through hip hop and break dance techniques, participants will explore movement improvisation, learn how to express themselves through dance, and improve their musical motor skills. The workshop’s primary goal is to become a space of fertile discussion and exchange of ideas, knowledge and inspiration, in an effort to promote collaborative culture, meaningful communication among the prisoners, and free expression. The workshop will come complete with a presentation, in which prisoners will synchronize their moves to the rhythm and perform their own choreographies.

Planning / Implementation: Elias Hadjigeorgiou (dancer, choreographer), Aidi Ormeni (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Special Youth Detention Center in Volos

Participants will be taught movement motifs of modern dance and break dance and will work as a team to express themselves freely and co-create their own material. Through a collaborative creation process, they will cultivate mutual respect, regardless of their differences, develop creative thinking and individual skills, and boost their own confidence. Moreover, they will discover their body’s movement limitations and acquire a better perception of space through different movement levels and directions.

Planning / Implementation:  Dimokritos Sifakis (dancer), Dimitris-Evangelos Dokouzis (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Donor to the educational programme in penitentiaries

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

Intercultural opera hub for a mixed group of 30 Athenians and unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors aged 14-18 from across Attica

In collaboration with Kinoniko EKAV and European Expression

The established intercultural opera hub for teenagers Co-OPERAtive returns for a fourth year. The programme, awarded the 2019 Fedora Education Prize, draws inspiration from opera and foregrounds the importance of interculturalism in art as a factor that facilitates artistic creation and bridges cultural differences. The participants in the mixed group of the 30 young Athenians and unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors aged 14 to 18 will be urged to produce their own ideas, express themselves artistically, and pit themselves against the creative process of making a music theatre work, which they will then be called upon to present on the GNO Alternative Stage in May 2024.

Creative team

Score: Panos Iliopoulos

Direction: Argyro Chioti

Sets, costumes: Pavlos Thanopoulos

Music workshops leader: Nikos Ziaziaris

Theatre workshops leader: Eleni Moleski

Dance workshops leader: Katerina Gevetzi

Starts on: Monday 16 October 2023

Day & hour: Mondays, 17.30-20.30

Age group: 14 to 18 year-olds

Performance date: Friday 31 May 2024

In collaboration with

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

This year, for a seventh consecutive year, the Intercultural Choir will continue expanding its repertoire by combining songs from the world’s folk traditions with modern vocal music. The connection of the voice with the body, movement and improvisation, will become for yet another year the basic tools for musical co-creation and free expression. For the Intercultural Choir’s new season, the GNO Learning & Participation Department has programmed new partnerships, as well as concerts within and outside Athens. The first of them will be given on Saturday 2 December in Vamvakou (Laconia) in collaboration with the Vamvakou Revival project, as part of the Christmas Celebration Events organized with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Choir mistress: Anna Linardou

Assistant to the maestro / Piano accompaniment: Dimitra Kokkinopoulou

Orchestrations: Vasso Dimitriou

Rehearsals start on: Monday 25 September 2023

Day & hours of rehearsals: Mondays, 18.30-20.30

The concert in Vamvakou (Laconia) is realized in collaboration with

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

Lead Donor of the GNO & Founding Donor of the GNO TV

Sponsor: PPC (Public Power Corporation)

As part of the celebrations marking the centennial anniversary of Callas’ birth, the Greek National Opera presents a video recital featuring the repertoire performed by Maria Kalogeropoulou in Athens from 1937 through until 1945, either for her conservatoire exams, or as part of production performances, auditions, events, and recitals. The video recital is set to premiere on 16 December 2023 on GNO TV and will be available to stream for free through until 31 December 2024 here: www.nationalopera.gr/gnotv.

The eminent opera artist and Callas expert Aris Christofellis presents a video recital produced under his artistic direction. Featuring performances by the emerging and established soloists Fanie Antonelou, Artemis Bogri, Vassiliki Karayanni, Maria Kostraki, Nina Koufochristou, Violetta Lousta, Chrissa Maliamani, and Mary-Ellen Nesi, the recital is a unique tribute offering both international audiences and coming generations an audio-visual treasure trove capturing –in chronological order, and meticulous historical detail– the “Greek” repertoire of Maria Callas. Sofia Tamvakopoulou performs on the piano. Also featuring the bass Tassos Apostolou.

Great arias of the repertoire, operas she would never sing again, Tosca and Cavalleria rusticana translated into Greek, songs by Greek composers, and popular “easy-listening” hits of the time –such as the celebrated “La Paloma”– comprise the “first, formative repertoire” of Callas’ career, shaped during those years in which she laid the foundations for her later professional path that would take her to the very top.

The arias and songs to be performed as part of this tribute will offer modern-day audiences a complete overview of her repertoire across the eight years she spent in Athens, and serve as invaluable touchstones for understanding the highly particular and pivotal nature of her training and early professional appearances. They also affirm the unprecedented abilities of the then still up-and-coming singer, and the influence Greece had on forging her star quality.

True to the spirit of those times, the works will be performed in the Greek language (in point of fact, in the exact same translations Callas herself sang), and it is worth noting here that most of these works were never to be performed again by the soprano at any point in her ensuing career. It is on precisely these works –the ones we have never heard her perform, and those she sang in Greek translation– that this tribute will focus its attentions.