A unique opportunity not only in Sicily, but also in Italy. The Kalophonia project returns to Catania, thanks to the collaboration between AreaSud and Unict. The 2024 edition will end with a prestigious concert in the Church of San Domenico, on 1 June, at 7.30pm, open to the public with free admission. For the occasion, the Kalophonia Ensemble, led by the Greek cantor Gerasimos Papadopoulos, will perform a repertoire of Byzantine liturgical songs belonging to the Greek and Sicilian-Albanian traditions, after the success achieved at the Pordenone International Festival of Sacred Music in December 2023.
The Kalophonia project intends to continue on the path of cultural valorization and construction of new forms of entertainment inaugurated in 2023, in order to expand the number of people interested in learning about musical practices, repertoires and cultural contents that are little frequented in our present. The study meeting develops starting from a careful selection of Byzantine liturgical songs from two ‘sister’ traditions: the Greek and the Sicilian-Albanian, in order to show how much the ‘Sicilian’ repertoire is the result of a stratification process occurred thanks to the channel of oral transmission, through a delicate balance between safeguarding and ‘re-Byzantinisation’. The songs coming from the Sicilian-Albanian tradition are combined with other versions of the same song coming from different historical and geographical contexts, with the aim of making people perceive the complexity of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine song tradition.
The exhibition opened on Thursday 30 May at the Tinni Tinni Arts Club, with the screening of the Greek film Eftychìa (directed by Angelos Frantzis – Greece, 2019 – Italian subtitles by Matteo Miano), the compelling story of the writer Eftychìa Papagiannopoulou (1893-1972) , who escaped the fire of Smyrna and went to Athens, where she became a major figure in Greek popular music and the country’s first woman author of song lyrics. The workshops which take place on Friday and Saturday morning, at the University Theater Center of Unict and the Church of San Domenico, are organized by Giuseppe Sanfratello (ethnomusicologist, research fellow at Disum, Unict) and Gerasimos Papadopoulos (ecclesiastical cantor and musician of Athens), exceptional Greek guest who returns to Catania as part of the collaboration with AreaSud in anticipation of a new international project aimed at sacred music, in preparation for 2025.
