NEW YORK — A well-heeled, if not always well-behaved, audience at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 15 hailed an instructive, impressive yet in some respects frustrating concert by the Greek National Opera Orchestra, which concentrated on music inspired by the great Cretan-born author Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957).
New York’s major concert halls can boast of their own high-level programming, but they can also be rented for the use of a vast range of groups. Of course, Carnegie presents many of the world’s leading orchestras and sometimes even opera companies: Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper brought a superb 2018 concert Rosenkavalier under Kirill Petrenko. March 2027 promises a concert Ring Cycle from Opernhaus Zürich, led by Gianandrea Noseda.
Great operatic ensembles have periodically visited the Metropolitan Opera as guests. Different generations of operagoers can share tales of repertoire and singers discovered in local visits by the Rome and Hamburg companies (1960s), Moscow’s Bolshoi (1970s), the Finnish and English National Operas (early 1980s), and the Kirov/Mariinsky (1995-2010). Everyone benefits from such cultural exchange and exposure.
What the Greek National Opera Orchestra concert lacked, aside from written or projected texts of the unfamiliar material, was, well, opera. But it brought some very stimulating orchestral showpieces that revealed the high quality of the players and — in the assured ensemble work and well-executed solos — a high degree of rehearsal. And we did hear two striking vocal soloists.
The company, established in 1939, has long toiled in the honorable margins of European musical institutions. The teenaged Maria Callas began her career there, and some international-level talents arose, notably baritone Kostas Paskalis (too sparingly used by the Met 1965-75), who made his debut as a principal in 1951 and eventually led the company. Occasionally, returning Greek stars or other international artists would appear, particularly in outdoor performances at Epidaurus or the Parthenon’s Odeon of Herodes Atticus. What has made Athens an operatic “destination” is a collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which helped open a modern theater a decade ago and has given the company resources to broaden its repertoire and artistic horizons.
The Carnegie program bore the punning title “Nikos Kazantzakis: An Odyssey In Music”; Kazantzakis had a lifelong fascination (and carried on a meta-literary dialogue) with Homer. New York — Carnegie as well as the Met — knew the Athens-born Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) as a brilliant, nonpareil conductor. It was interesting to hear his lively if occasionally bombastic Cretan Feast in the Dvořák-Ravel-Canteloube tradition of adapting folk melodies and devices to a late-Romantic idiom. The work was showily if skillfully orchestrated by Nikos Skalkottas (1904-49), three similar but more emotionally involving selections from whose own Cretan Dances followed, played with bravura.
The evening’s conductor, Vassilis Christopoulos, then led Amor Fati — by GNO’s artistic director Giorgos Koumendakis — extremely well: a rhythmically challenging and fascinating evocation of Crete’s nature and traditions using no traditional folk instruments but rather modern orchestral forces including prominent vibraphones. Here, as elsewhere, the orchestra’s percussion section and its shimmering-toned concertmaster Iordanis Santos Mastralexis, all of 26, shone.
After intermission, the huge orchestra vanished and the stage revealed an ensemble of eight: basic string instruments, plus guitar, Cretan lyre, laouto (a Greek lute), and mandolin as well as an elegant harpsichord. With the lovely voiced, dramatically striking (though admirably restrained in gesture) lyric soprano Maria Kostraki, they performed a suite of 10 numbers, all but three incorporating singing, from Manos Hadjidakis’ cycle Captain Michalis. The instrumentation was precise, yet varied and colorful. Kostraki’s amplified voice, pure and exact of pitch, showed good classical training but could add a folkish guttural texture resembling flamenco’s cante jondo to the final, desperate song. Phrasing with musicality, she conveyed deep feeling, winning many ovations.
Some of the non-Greek listeners had doubtless come to hear the local reappearance of mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, the volcanic-voiced Georgian singer who quickly scored many Met triumphs after her 2011 debut. Alas, postpartum problems damaged her health, and her last Met showing, a 2022 Amneris, was vocally compromised. Bitter contractual struggles resulted.
Rachvelishvili has since ventured several low-lying roles — Cherubini’s Neris, Verdi’s Ulrica, and Mistress Quickly — and, with the GNO, Carmen, Ponchielli’s La Cieca, and Massenet’s Charlotte. But while it was a great pleasure to re-encounter this committed, lavishly gifted artist, the full tonal scope and range of her current resources proved hard to estimate from the short and relatively undemanding songs she performed here in the course of the ballet suite made from the now-iconic soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis for Michael Cacoyannis’ 1964 film Zorba the Greek.
The individual, dark sound was there, as well as the deep investment, extending to leading the applause when the world-famous bouzouki playing kicked in. Perhaps due to nervous caution, Rachvelishvili’s volume seemed somewhat reduced, and some upper notes had flutter or edge. The roles from Medea and La Gioconda seem credible options; surely things like Wagner’s Erda, Mahler’s Second and Third symphonies, and Prokoviev’s Alexander Nevsky all beckon. Beyond that, one can hope. Rachvelishvili sang Il trovatore‘s wide-ranging Azucena at Madrid’s Teatro Real in July; reports were good.
As it happens, due to unfortunate timing, the Madrid company — one of Europe’s finest — was performing in Manhattan the very same night as the Greek ensemble, at David Geffen Hall. They’ve brought their impressive forces here several times in the last few years. The Carnegie outing in June 2025 introduced audiences to two exciting artists, conductor David Afkham and soprano Saioa Hernández. The latter — with the kind of old-fashioned, capacious tone best appreciated in theatrical, not digital, acoustics — makes her Met debut in six Tosca performances this season (Nov. 1-20).
This year’s singer was internationally rising Guatemalan soprano Adriana González. I couldn’t attend that performance but the night before heard an enjoyable recital of evergreens from opera and zarzuela sung by four young artists of the Teatro Real’s Crescendo program. Far and away the most accomplished: Italian mezzo-soprano Ester Ferraro, already a sure stylist (in Mozart, Offenbach, and Delibes), with a beautiful personal timbre. The three Spanish singers all had fine attributes but are works-in-progress, naturally most comfortable inflecting their native language.
Hearing other nations’ repertoire seems vital at this rocky, nationalistic juncture. One hopes the Greek National Opera can bring a Greek-language work here soon — maybe the translated version of Bohuslav Martinů’s Kazantzakis-based final masterpiece, The Greek Passion, which thematizes welcoming foreigners.
