Stelios Coucounaras - Symphony No. 3 I. Allegro con brio

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2/5/2016 & 22/5/2016 The National Theatre Orchestra of Prague Conductor: Jaroslav Brych

Stelios Coucounarás was born in Athens on the 12th of May in 1936. His first lessons in piano and in musical theory were with Maria Poulaki, sister of the head master of the Athens National Orchestra Filoktitis Oikonomidis.
He continued his studies in harmony, counter point and morphology with Marios Vorvoglis, while at the same time he registered for the Law School in Athens University- a course which he abandoned two years later, in order to follow his musical studies at the Hochshule fur Musik und Theater in Hamburg.
In Hamburg he studied composition with Ernst- Gernot Klussman, collaborating colleague amongst others of Richard Strauss (for whom he transcripted his two last operas, one to symphonic jazz with Werner Fritsch and the other for the piano with Will Schultz- Klinstroem).
Along with his studies, he followed the Academy’s special seminars about the various forms of the 12-tone system, the P. Hindemith’s system and practically the whole of the innovative phases, using sporadically some elements of those techniques in his own compositions as a timbre.
Academy Performance Award in 1962.
During the early sixties it was already starting to grow upon him the belief that only one in its broad meaning return at the tonal centers could guarantee an historical continuity in the contemporary music-he was against this a priori denial of the past actions, against the endless atonal
experiments and of course against treating the audience in a cynical way, imposing the «who cares if you hear or not» attitude. As for Ernst Krenek’ s opinion that composers owe their gratitude to the 12tone system because it deliberated them from the tyranny of inspiration (!), he claimed that this was a perversion of thinking. Those opinions found their appeal in chief broadcasting radio stations such as the Bavarian Radio, the Northern German Radio, the Royal Swedish Radio and also the Greek Radio where they have attributed to him extended presentations.
In 2002 top artists of the Bayreuth Festival commissioned Mr Coucounaras to transcript works of Brahms and Wagner, which were performed during the festival in the Wahnfried Villa, the house where Richard Wagner lived and died. The same trancriptions have been performed at the Zeilitzheimer festival too. At 2004 the German Music Council after the proposal of his honorary president proffessor W. Krütsfeldt, invited him to give a series of lectures in German Musical Academies about the future of the contemporary classical music.
Stelios Coucounarás compositions have been performed in Greece (Greek Radio Orchestra, Megaron Mousikis, Nakkas Conservatory Auditorium etc.), in many European countries, in the U. S. and in Israel. He is both member of the Greek and of the German Composers Union.
On the 8th December 2014 he was awarded with honorary distinction from the Greek Theatrical and Musical Critics Union in the section of musicological essays for his book «Populism and Music, Blues, Rock, Rebeticon. Three mythologies, one true, two false».