Daily UK News

by Richard Whitehouse

Not much success came to Greece’s great composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904-49) in his relatively brief life. But he left 36 Greek Dances which hold the same place in his compatriots’ affections that Brahms’s Hungarian Dances do for Germans and Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances for Czechs.

The Athens State Orchestra, in which Skalkottas played the violin for much of his career, performs the first set of 12 superbly under former chief conductor Stefanos Tsialis.

Piquant in their orchestrations, the Dances are tremendously varied and Skalkottas does not merely trot out folksy tunes – he makes them his own with a dazzling sense of style. The disc also includes three attractive excerpts for chamber orchestra from the 1949 folk ballet The Sea: the third one, Dance of the Waves, gives the programme its overall title. From the time of his studies with Arnold Schoenberg comes the 1929 Suite No. 1, which Skalkottas reconstructed after losing the MS: it is more sober in style but full of incident.