Christos Hatzis

Christos Hatzis was born in Volos, Greece on March 21, 1953. He received his early music training at the local branch of the Hellenic Conservatory and later at the Eastman School of Music and SUNY at Buffalo, from which school he received his Ph.D. in 1982. He emigrated to Canada in 1982 and became a Canadian citizen in 1985.

He has lived in Toronto ever since and has been active as a free-lance composer and a teacher after a rather long stint as a nightclub musician. Christos is married to percussionist Beverley Johnston and they live together at their rural home outside of Uxbridge, Ontario.

Christos Hatzis is “one of the most important composers in Canada” (International Musician) and is recently enjoying international recognition for his work. He is the recipient of the 1998 Jean A. Chalmers National Music Award for his composition Nunavut, the 1996 (Governor General) Jules Legér Prize for Erotikos Logos, the 1996 Prix Italia Special Prize for Footprints in New Snow (it was the first time this prestigious broadcasting award went to a Canadian composer), the 1998 Prix Bohemia Special Prize for the same work, the 2002 New Pioneer Award, as well as three Juno Award nominations (2003, 2004 and 2006) in addition to his 2006 Juno Award in the “Classical Composition of the Year” category. He has composed major works for all media and is the recipient of numerous commissions from some of the best-known artists in Canada and abroad.

Christos’ works are “brilliant, complex, and intellectually and emotionally challenging but [they] touch the heart of the average listener” (Paul Pedersen). His music has been featured in many international festivals, is being broadcast regularly by CBC and foreign networks and is frequently performed worldwide. In addition to composing, Christos teaches composition full-time as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto.

Since the early eighties, he has stylistically gravitated towards eclecticism, eventually developing his own unique post-modern aesthetic influenced by the music of the third world (The Temptation of St. Anthony, Nadir, Orbiting Garden, Crucifix, Pavillons En l’ Air, Byzantium, Pyrrichean Dances), jazz and pop music (On Cerebral Dominance, The Birth of Venus), the music of J. S. Bach (Equivoque, Mortiferum Fel, Stylus, The Gouldberg Variations, Concerto for Flute and Chamber Orchestra, Farewell to Bach) and of other Baroque composers (Burial Ground).

His most recent music is influenced by religious and/or spiritual themes and New Age ideas, and by the culture of the Inuit.

Premieres of Mr. Hatzis’ music from 2003 to ’07 included venues such as The Royal Opera House at Convent Garden, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Barbican Center and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, UK, The Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Lively Arts Center in Palo Alto, CA, the Megaron in Athens, Greece, The Winspear Centre in Edmonton and the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.

In 2007, Mr. Hatzis was composer-in-residence with three Canadian music festivals: Winnipeg New Music Festival; Scotia Festival of Music and Festival of the Sound. The Camerata Orchesra of Athens under the direction of Alexander Myrat has performed a Hatzis work in each season during the past few years, while the 2004 Byzantine Festival in London built its theme around his The Troparion of Kassiani. His recent large-scale work Sepulcher of Life, for soloists, choir and orchestra was commissioned by four different Canadian philharmonic choirs and already has had nine performances across North America by nine different presenters, including a remarkable performance at the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in May 2004.

His most important multimedia music theatre piece, Constantinople, performed at sold-out halls at Banff and Toronto during the summer and fall of 2004 and was described by the Toronto Star as “A multimedia feast of the imagination.”

In June 2005 Constantinople opened the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, and it is now signed by IMG Artists Management for international touring. Constantinople had several prestigious international performances in 2007 including five completely sold-out shows at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in March.

He is an advocate of borderless culture and many of his most recent works bridge the gap between classical music and today’s popular music idioms, His compositions are structurally complex while sonically accessible. He has created several works inspired by the music of the Inuit, Canada’s arctic inhabitants, and his Inuit-inspired works, particularly the award winning radio documentary Footprints in New Snow, have promoted Inuit culture around the globe. Most of Hatzis’ writings and other information about the composer are posted at www.hatzis.com.

Christos Hatzis’ music is published by Promethean Editions, based in Wellington, New Zealand.

 

EVERLASTING LIGHT

As far as I was concerned, this 40-minute piece [Everlasting Light] was the whole program and it’s surprising we haven’t heard more about this masterpiece…there was nothing to lead one to expect a piece of music that turned out to be so ravishingly beautiful…Its movement is slow, some of the harmonies are very close and the feeling of ambience is indescribable…I personally found Everlasting Light very heartening because until now I’ve felt like a heathen listening to the music of Henryk Górecki and the so-called “holy minimalists” and even Arvo Pärt to an extent. This was far more beautiful than anything I’ve heard from any of them. The music has, in fact, a potent sense of otherworldliness and an immense quiet dignity. It has (grave) melody where the others supply only monastic medieval-sounding monody – frankly, monotony – and there isn’t a moment in it that feels calculated or anything less than sincerely felt. Echoes of it followed me all the way home. The Cantata Singers under conductor Eric Hannan rose magnificently to its demands, as did its subtle percussionist, Anne-Julie Caron. She was the special guest on the program and performed with a talent reminiscent of Evelyn Glennie. It was amazing how she managed five minutes, or it could have been 10, of very soft thrumming as she held down a minor third. As already said, it could have been the whole concert…But everything was forgivable for the unforgettable  Everlasting Light.

Lloyd Dykk, The Vancouver Sun, October 21, 2008