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CD Feature/ Eva Fampas: "Fampas plays Fampas"

  Tobias

When you think of Greece, what do you see? A plate full of meat, Tzatziki and a rich salad with olives and tomatos? A group of red-headed,  bearded man bending down with their arms on their shoulders, dancing themselves and their audience faster and faster into ecstacy? The Akropolis, Zeus and his family of gods? Or do you think of those hot and yearning beaches, which rock band Blur once decried in their song “Boys and Girls”: “Street's like a jungle/ So call the police/ Following the herd down to Greece”? Whatever your vision, Classical Guitarist Eva Fampas will make you think again.

Which is not to say that the impressions mentioned in the first paragraph are necessarily out of place. Actually, not a single one of these cliches is entirely wrong and Greece certainly is a country which feeds of its past as much as it ridicules it. But hidden under its traditions, ceremonies and colourful history lies a different country – a tiny nation with a strong sense of independence and resistance against oppression, a country with a deep religious belief and a heart-felt closeness to its iconography, a proud place as much as a vulnerable one and a people caught between the worlds of the occident and the orient. All of this can be heard on “Fampas plays Fampas”, already the second take of Eva Fampas on her father’s music. Through these dances, suites, preludes and poems blows the wind of the Greece you know from picture postcards, there is the bitter sweetness of having a strong coffee out in the sun-burnt heat of Athens, there is the romantic isolation of endless olive groves in the setting sun, there’s even a “Syrtaki”, albeit more dreamy than the one you’ll know from your local restaurant. But then there’s also the bright lightning flashes of “Karaguna”, the undefined tension of the “Tsamikos Dance” (with Eva’s hand hitting the wood of the guitar like a heart underneath a dark veil) and the “Concert study no. 23”, which evokes pictures of an empty bar at night and the tear-filled taste of bad whiskey and sad cigarettes.

Dimitri Fampas is generally acknowledged as the most important Classical Guitarist ever to come from Greece. Thanks to this disc, not only does a part of his personality live on in his daughter, but also his music. That alone is an achievment in itself. But what’s more, this disc might just change your picture of Greece. After listening to, it, you will think all those wonderful tourist-cliches – and of Eva Fampas.

Homepage: Eva Fampas
Homepage: Aulia Records