The Greek Month in London

 

After working for Lina Lalandi (who was Greek 'thorough and thorough' as she would say) at the English Bach Festival and founding our agency with Andrew Rosner, I was invited by Norman Rosenthal and his colleague Christos Joachimides to be in charge of the music section of something called 'The Greek Month in London, Aspects of Contemporary Greek Culture.' If memory serves, this was in 1975.

The idea was to celebrate the end of the Junta and the new democratic Greek state but it was thought that such a festival would have greater international resonance if it took place in London rather than Athens. London was at that time one of the great artistic capitals of the world. I'm not sure you could say that these days.

Thanks to Lina Lalandi I was already familiar with the Greek music scene, or as familiar as I could have been without actually ever having gone there.

Norman and Christos did most of the work and left the music programme and its administration to me. 

The first thing that happened was that I received a flurry of communications from musicians and composers who had been active under the Junta saying they refused to participate in the festival. That was understandable as they were not going to be invited anyway. Less expected was the flurry of communications from those who had not collaborated with the Junta and would not participate on the grounds that I had been in touch with some of those who had! 

Even less expected were the 'refusals' from those who belonged to neither the collaborators nor the camp of exiles on the grounds that there was 'conflict'!

This left me with reduced options. One of them was Iannis Xenakis who was anyway the leading Greek composer of the day (or arguably any day) and he couldn't have cared less about with whom I had been in contact. Another idea was to programme some music by the gifted and promising Jani Christou who had tragically died in a car accident in 1970 and so was unable to object. There were others including such people as Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994), a pioneer of graphic notation who also didn't care as long as he got performed.

The Greeks are a tremendously talented nation but as I already knew from working with Lina, they can be a nightmare to deal with. One problem I came across frequently was the idea that an invitation to participate in the Greek Month in London was the means by which they could have a comfortable retirement. It was all a bit of a nightmare and nearly did me in.

The final snafu was an irate communication from the top 'Greek Month in London' committee in Athens lambasting me for not having thanked them for having sent me a calendar they has had printed especially to send to colleagues. I had indeed received this calendar and promptly threw it in the waste paper basket, thinking it was some 'shlorum' from a souvenir shop.