Samos Summer Academy 2024
On 21 June Dr Bryan White from the School of Music at the University of Leeds led a group of six students from the School in a collaboration with staff and students from Athens Conservatoire in Greece
The 3rd Samos Early Music Summer Academy was hosted by the Schwarz Foundation. Dimitris Kountouras, Baroque recorder and flute player, and Fani Vovini, Baroque violinist, both from the Centre for Early Music at the Athens Conservatoire joined with Dr White and Marilena Souri (Greek National Opera) to lead students in a programme of English and French music from the late seventeenth century. An intensive week of rehearsals was complemented by lectures on performance practice (Fani Vovoni), the pastoral in Baroque music (Dimitris Kountouras) and English opera in the seventeenth century (Bryan White).
The course also included a trip to significant historical sites on Samos, the Heraion and the Eupalinian aqueduct. The academy culminated in a concert, ‘Love and Loss in Arcadia’ at the Municipality building of Vathi in Samos on 28 June. The programme included the Act II masque for Henry Purcell’s, The Fairy Queen, the dialogue of the despairing lovers from Matthew Locke’s music for Psyche, the final act of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, the final act of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, J. B. Lully’s March for the Turkish Ceremony of the Le Bourgeois Gentihomme, and a selection of French airs de court.
