Skalkottas nikos biography of rory

24grammata.com/ μουσική
(biography by Christophe Sirodeau – English version)

Despite a very striking personality, an abundant œuvre of a very high quality and a highly original musical language, the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949), a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill and Philipp Jarnach, has remained almost unknown to the public up to the present; he is known only from dictionary entries and to a small number of musicians.

Nevertheless, in the 1965 edition of Larousse’s French musical dictionary, the musicologist Harry Halbreich in his article on Greek music already wrote: ‘But it is the following generation (after the founders of the national school, Kalomiris and Petridis) who offer us the greatest of all Hellenic composers, Nikos Skalkottas’.

And Halbreich adds later: ‘His œuvre is warm, lyrical and sombre like Alban Berg’s, sometimes as tenuous and re.ned as that of Webern, and as rhythmical as Stravinsky or Bartók. But, abo