Abhisheka

Although few will be aware of it, and even fewer will remember what it sounded like, music by John Psathas had a world-wide audience in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympics, for which he wrote or arranged as many as 13 different pieces. He is more likely to be remembered in Manchester for his View from Olympus, which was first performed here during the Commonwealth Games in 2002. A New Zealand composer of Greek ancestry, he first came into international prominence in 1991 when Evelyn Glennie took up his Matre’s Dance at the beginning of what has turned out to be a fruitful collaboration for both of them.

Abhisheka is quite different from the high-energy Glennie pieces. “Drafted immediately after reading a book by the Buddhist guru Chögyam Trungpa,” he explains, “Abhisheka was my first ever attempt at writing music with space in it. Until this piece, practically everything I had written was ultra-caffeinated, fast, full of notes and murder on performers. But having been (albeit temporarily) inspired by the great truths and peace in Trungpa’s writing, I found myself navigating slow passages of musical time, as well as exploring the microcosm of inner space between the even intervals of our chromatic tuning system.” The micro-intervals in the solos that occasionally break out from the dissonant background give the work not only a fascinatingly exotic character but also a mystic eloquence.