The ancient Greek lyre will sound again along the Riviera coast on Friday 28th August, when the ensemble Les Lyristes performs a one-off concert at the Villa Kérylos in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a seafront villa built as a recreation of an ancient Greek residence.
The evening promises a musical journey spanning more than two thousand years, staged in a setting that draws directly on Hellenic civilisation. The villa, commissioned in the early 1900s by the archaeologist and scholar Théodore Reinach and overlooking the Baie des Fourmis, offers a fitting backdrop for a programme that reaches back to antiquity.
A dialogue across the centuries
The lyre player Nikos Xanthoulis leads the ensemble, joined by Evangelia Kopsalidou on the ancient Greek lyre and barbitos, and the soprano Myrsini Margariti. Together they set the hymns and poetry of antiquity against Greek musical traditions and contemporary composition, drawing the ancient instrument out of the museum case and back into living performance.
The programme opens with a prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach before moving through some of the oldest surviving music in the Western canon, including the first chorus of Euripides’ Oreste from 408 BC, the Delphic Paean of around 128 BC and the Epitaph of Seikilos, often cited as the earliest complete musical composition to survive. From there the concert turns to the traditional song Thalassaki mou and to modern settings of the poetry of Sappho, alongside works by Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis.
The evening reaches beyond the strictly Hellenic, too, with the ensemble’s arrangements taking in The Beatles’ Yesterday and Luiz Bonfá’s Manhã de Carnaval before closing with Ô Bacchos, drawn from Sophocles’ Antigone.
The performers
Nikos Xanthoulis is a composer and researcher, an associate of the Academy of Athens and a corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute of America. Formerly solo trumpet of the Greek National Opera orchestra, he has devoted himself since 2010 to reviving the ancient Greek lyre, publishing what is described as the first method in the world for the seven-string instrument and founding the first university course dedicated to it.
Myrsini Margariti is a soprano whose repertoire ranges from the baroque to contemporary music, praised internationally for the purity of her timbre and her stage presence, and now teaching at conservatoires in Athens. Evangelia Kopsalidou is a musicologist and lyre player who has taught at the Democritus University of Thrace since 2003 and performs in Greece and abroad.
Practical details
The concert begins at 8pm, followed at around 9.20pm by a Greek buffet cocktail. Tickets cost 60 euros per person, and booking in advance is advised. The Villa Kérylos is on Rue Gustave Eiffel in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a short journey along the coast from Monaco and served by Beaulieu-sur-Mer railway station.
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Photo credit: Clément Roux