Greece Travel Index/Greek Islands/Syros
Festival of the Aegean 2009
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Festival of the Aegean 2009
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MidAmerica Productions, New York City THE FIFTH ANNUAL "Serious Fun in a Great Space" Raymond Hughes Renato Zanella Pan-European Philharmonia Orchestra
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Schedule for Festival of the Aegean 2009: WEDNESDAY (Opening Night), FRIDAY and SUNDAY, THURSDAY and SATURDAY, JULY 2 and 4, 2009: MONDAY, JULY 6, 2009, 7:30 PM: TUESDAY and WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 and 8, 2009: WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2009, 11 AM: THURSDAY, FRIDAY and SATURDAY,
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The theater was the "home" for hundreds of resident Italians who came for months each summer from Venice and Milano on their way to the Far East. Syros was the midpoint. After the theater was built more and more Italians would stay longer and longer on this beautiful island, and opera performances occurred each summer—Tosca, Il Trovatore, La Boheme, to name a few. Theatrical productions and recitals aso occurred from the 1850s to the early 1900s. The Italian residents, in the early 1900s, departed the island never to reutrn. The theater was then taken over by the resident Greeks who turned it into a movie house until the early 1960s, after which time it was closed for some forty years until the renovation was concluded in the late 1990s. The theater was badly damaged by an air raid bombing in 1944 and subsequently fell into disuse. Further, it was to become a target for the military junta who took power in Greece two decades later. With philistine zeal, they determined to eradicate any foreign influence, removing paintings, original boxes and galleries, leaving the theater in a sorry state. Reconstruction work began in the 1980s, and the theater was reopened in July 2000: The velvet seats are back, the ceiling paintings are impressive, and with them a sense of grandeur has returned. Today four levels of boxes oversee the wooden stage with a width of 18 meters, depth of 9 meters. The first opera performance in the Apollo—after a hundred years of no opera performances—was Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, produced by the Festival of the Aegean, Peter Tiboris conductor, on July 14 2005. Ticket
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A second-generation Greek-American, Mr. Peter Tiboris launched the Festival of the Aegean first on the island of Mykonos. In 2000 he created Opera Aegean,
initially based in Athens as a training and touring company. Since then, Opera
Aegean has offered a summer festival on the island of Syros, presenting
operatic, theatrical, and concert events. In 2005, the festival presented
Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia and in the summer of 2006, Mozart’s
Don Giovanni. There were four concerts in 2006 and eleven in 2007,
including Mascagni’s opera Zanetto and appearances by Taximi, Stratos
Vougas Jazz Quartet, and Human Touch featuring David Lynch. Mr Tiboris has a long and distiguished carreer and has performed with the most respected orchestras in the most reknown concert halls in the world. He is the founder, music director and conductor of the Manhattan Philharmonic.
The annual Festival of the Aegean takes place at the Apollo Municipal Theater, aka "La Piccola Scala" in Hermoupolis, the main town of the island of Syros. The building was constructed in 1862-1864 and accommodated the first theatrical performance, La Favorita by Gaetano Donizetti, on October
3, 1864.
