Composer-politicians are nothing new: think of Paderewski, who became Prime Minister of Poland, or in our own time, the Estonian Arts Minister, Lepo Sumera. The Greek Thanos Mikroutsikos (b.1947) served as his country’s Minister of Culture for almost two years (1994-6). He is best known, however, as a composer of (hundreds of) popular songs, plus theatre and film music. Yet his more serious output includes opera, chamber and orchestral scores, as well as song-cycles and choral pieces.
The three orchestral works collected here are evidence of his fluency and craft as a composer, though the voice lacks personality. The music does not sound especially Greek either, though there is a vaguely cinematic Mediterranean feel, with a deal of quirky, slightly off-beat invention. Take the opening of the engaging if overlong Guitar Concerto (1992), which starts out teasingly as if the cello were the soloist. The first movement has a distracting secondary idea highly suggestive of the gentler Hindemith, while the finale has more than a hint of Villa-Lobos about it, though the general Latin-American character may have been accentuated by Leo Brouwer’s direction. Anyone knowing Vasks’s Cantabile or Truscott’s Elegy will find Slow Motion (1990) for string orchestra rather disappointing; The Hell of a Season (1989), ‘a nightmare in orchestral sound’ according to the notes, is quite fun but tame. Performances and sound quality are more than adequate. Would it be politic to suggest that the resources might have been better employed furthering Skalkottas’s rather worthier cause?'