Eikonostasi 7Up

Ensemble & Orchestral.

Title
Eikonostasi 7Up

soprano, violin, piano & soundtrack

Description

A work inspired by the roadside Eikonostasia (literally ‘icon-stands’). These shrines, erected to mark the sites of traffic accidents on roads in Greece, are extremely diverse in design, site placement and condition. Bearing testimony to lives lost, many house a small lamp that is fuelled with oil stored in a variety of receptacles. I came across an interesting one with a 7Up bottle inside it and was struck by the dissonant, yet curiously apt, combination of sacred and secular imagery. The shrine depicted here stands on the winding road between my home on Mount Pelion and the Aegean port of Volos.

Eikonostasi 7Up is in 4 movements with a sung text in Greek drawn from a number of sources. The work combines and conflates the autobiographical (parental love and yearning), liturgical (Kyrie Eleison, Doxa en Ipsistis) and metaphysical (brilliant eyes, golden cross, mad blood, bitter heart).

Commissioned by
Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham.

First Performance
Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Northumberland, 25 June 1999

Liz Potter (soprano) Geoff Hannan (piano), Emma Welton (violin),

Duration
14′