Ypogeia Revmata bring 'Poetry in Music' to Bush Hall, setting Palamas, Karyotakis, Varnalis and Gryparis to rock for the London edition of the GRis Festival.
Ypogeia Revmata — Undercurrents — started in 1992 in Kallithea, southern Athens, as a group of classmates who had rented a room to play their own songs in. Thirty-four years later they are among the longest-serving rock bands in Greece, and the thing that has kept them interesting is a habit they formed early: setting the country’s poets to music rather than writing lyrics of their own. Palamas, Karyotakis, Varnalis and Gryparis are not decorative choices. They are the poets Greek schoolchildren learn by heart, which means the audience arrives already knowing the words.
‘Poetry in Music’ is the programme built around that habit, mixing those settings with the band’s own catalogue, arranged for this occasion. Andreas Michalopoulos, Professor of Latin Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, speaks before the music begins. The settings are the band’s own arrangements.
The date is the London edition of the GRis Festival, the Athens-founded programme that has taken contemporary Greek work to Nicosia, New York, Thessaloniki and Berlin. Bush Hall, a former Edwardian dance hall on the Uxbridge Road, holds around three hundred people, which is the right scale for a repertoire that depends on hearing the words. Very little of this music has been played in Britain before. The professor speaking first is not a formality; the poems need placing before they are sung.