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He
has a feeling for poetry, and he expresses the atmosphere of each and every
poet. His work shows a youthful spontaneity together with will and thought.
It is bold, without being muddled. Kasassoglou knows what he wants. He does
not copy the style of others.
He tries to perfect his individuality in the sense that he creates only
out of himself. He believes in a nationalism in music.
For, as he himself says: Each serious intellectual has no choice but
to place himself as part of his nation and, as a result, in the whole of
universal life. The more essential and spontaneous his spiritual statement
is, together with the knowledge of his duty towards his country, the more
the intellectual will be even unconsciously the bearer of
the culture of his nation, wherever he may be ... And therefore I can only
feel a work to be universal if it has a home. ...
He composed in 1946 the Olympic Hymn on verses by Kostis Palamas.
In 1952 the antique comedy The Clouds by Aristophanes was performed
at the Comédie Française in Paris under the direction
of Sokratis Karantinos and with incidental music by Georgios Kasassoglou.
One of the most significant moments in his artistic career was his encounter
and his acquaintance with Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky started his enthusiastic
appraisal of the music of The Clouds, that he had heard at the
Comédie Française, with the sentence: I
hear Greece in your music and I feel Greece in your handshake. |
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