Icarus Sampati

Between Alexandros Markeas and TM+, from one creation to the next, the companionship has become a brotherhood that travels beyond the boundaries of musical genres, too often drawn straight in red ink. A common adventure, an exploration of bordering territories. In 2014 and 2021, with Ypokosmos, the composer and the ensemble plunged professional and amateur musicians into an “oratorio of the slums” to sing the misery and dignity of the poor in modern Greece.

This season, with Icarus Sampati, Alexandros Markeas draws even deeper into the rhizome of origins; he goes back into the memory of civilizations, from our own familiar Mediterranean one, to the strange India that was thought to be inaccessible, in search of the universal myth. Icarus burns in the sun of pride to defy his condition, Sampati burns in the sun of empathy to save his brother.

The Western instrumental ensemble, the percussion from here and there, the solo voices bathed in the chorus of Bangladeshi women: everything in this epic, utopian and unprecedented cantata is a dizzying balancing act. Between the exact writing and the freedom of the air, the crumpled sound textures and the bright rhythms, the Byzantine traditions and the Hindu modes, the refinement of the madrigal and the fertile land of popular music. Icarus and Sampati are our human brothers who are similar without being the same. Their wives, their sisters sing “a glorious myth and a barely audible suffering […] in a writing of the multitude which seems to correspond to the expression of the world which surrounds us”.