Stavros Xarchakos: Here and Now
Stavros Xarchakos gave two concerts titled Here and Now at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on 5 and 6 June 2026, with Iro Saia and Dimitris Basis, during the Athens Epidaurus Festival.
Here and Now was a concert programme by the Greek composer Stavros Xarchakos, given on 5 and 6 June 2026 at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. The Athens Epidaurus Festival presented it among the Farewell Celebrations, the month of performances held at the Odeon in June 2026 before the monument closed for a restoration of several years.
Xarchakos, then 87, directed the music and built the evening in three parts. In the first he talked and sang with the lyricist Lina Nikolakopoulou, with a piano and a string quartet. In the second Iro Saia sang new songs he had written for her. In the third Dimitris Basis joined them for songs from the composer’s older catalogue, with a 10-piece orchestra and pupils of the En Chordais kai Organois music school on Syros.
Xarchakos first conducted the Syros pupils in an unplanned performance at a taverna on the island in June 2022. He studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and then at the Juilliard School in New York, on the advice of Leonard Bernstein. He had last played the Odeon in September 2025.