Christos Hatzis was the easy choice when it came to picking someone to write a piece in honour of flute emeritus Randi Nelson. His composition Departures breathes life into the instrument that Randi loved so much and she was thrilled when the SSO performed the work in 2019. The SSO is delighted to work with Hatzis and to give the world premiere of his new work Up to Her Waist in Lupins.
“I feel strongly that with my music, I am trying to force a tiny opening in the clouds that will allow His Light to shine through. At best, I am a follower, not a master, and my MASTER holds the patterns and patents of my being and work. So, in the best of circumstances, I can only think of myself as an imitator.”
CHRISTOS HATZIS
With two earlier Juno awards, two 2017 Juno nominations and a 2017 Juno award for his double CD Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation, several national and international awards and a slew of recent commissions by internationally recognized touring artists and orchestras, University of Toronto professor Christos Hatzis is constantly active on the international music scene. Hatzis’s music is continuously presented in performance and broadcast (approx. 100 performances worldwide each of the past three pre-Covid years,) an online audio playlist with over 1,700,000 hits, and a stream of CD recordings on Naxos, Deutsche Grammophon, Centrediscs, EMI, Analekta, Sony, CBC and other major and independent labels, several of them all-Hatzis albums. The Hilary Hahn’s Deutsche Grammophon recording In 27 Pieces, which includes Hatzis’s Coming To won a Grammy Award in 2015 and topped many international top 10 lists that year. Christos Hatzis is widely recognized as “one of the most important composers writing today” (CBC) and “a contemporary Canadian master” (New Yorker). He is pioneering a distinct breed of 21st Century music which combines intellectual complexity and clarity, emotional/psychological directness and technical mastery of various media and musical idioms. His recent work focuses on climate change, geopolitical diversity, indigenous issues, migration, environmental consciousness and human rights. Recent premieres include Vernal Equinox, a marimba concerto commissioned by marimbist Theodor Milkov on the theme of the of the Greek independence war and its recent Bicentennial. Hatzis often writes about contemporary music and its relationship to today’s society and has recently completed the writing of a book on Pythagorean harmonic and metaphysical philosophy titled Resonance: A Journey of Connections Made by Intuition and an esoteric memoir titled Searching for the Right Key: The First Forty Years.