| Contemporary music |
Embrace: Galan Trio and Zacharias Tarpagkos find warmth in a chaotic world
Not every worthwhile album needs to unsettle you to be worth your time. Embrace, the release from fantastic Athens’ Galan Trio with very special guest flutist Zacharias Tarpagkos, makes a genuinely persuasive case for the opposite instinct: that in a moment when so much contemporary music reaches for dissonance and difficulty as proof of seriousness, there’s real value, and real craft, in music that simply wants to hold you.
The album’s premise comes from Three Essential Elements, Inc., the international composers’ collective behind all eight works here, whose stated mission is to foster connection between composer, performer and listener rather than distance. It’s a lovely, exciting, almost old-fashioned ambition, and on Embrace it translates into a program of unabashedly melodic, richly tonal chamber music drawn from seven different countries, all filtered through the same quartet of players. The result is neither saccharine nor safe, it’s simply warm, generous music, played by musicians who clearly believe in every note of it.
What makes Embrace particularly interesting within the Galan Trio’s growing discography is the presence of Zacharias Tarpagkos, principal flutist of Armonia Atenea and a soloist who has played everything from Boston’s Symphony Hall to the BBC Proms, where one critic praised the “otherworldliness” he brought to Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”. That’s a genuinely serious pedigree, built through study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Strasbourg Conservatory, collaborations with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Teodor Currentzis, and a parallel life as a committed champion of new music through work with Ensemble Modern and the Lutosławski Quartet. On paper, adding a soloist of that calibre to an established trio could easily have tipped the balance of the group, but in practice, Tarpagkos folds into the Galan Trio’s sound so completely that by the second or third track, it’s hard to imagine these pieces any other way. This isn’t a trio-plus-soloist record, it’s a genuine quartet album.
The program itself plays like a set of postcards. Garry D. W. Judd’s opener, “In the Light of Greece (and the Parthenon Sculptures)”, sets an immediately gracious tone. Petros Bouras’s piano work has real luminosity here, matching the piece’s subject with genuine warmth rather than pastoral cliché. Ilan Chouraki’s four-movement “George in Paris” follows with real wit, its shifting Andante-Allegro-Adagio-Presto structure giving Tarpagkos room to sound genuinely jazz-adjacent at points, a nod to Gershwin’s own transatlantic curiosity rendered through very different instrumentation than the original.
Igor Vorobyov’s “Spring on the Ladoga” is one of the album’s loveliest surprises, its interplay between flute and piano capturing something genuinely seasonal, thaw, movement, light returning, without ever leaning on obvious tone-painting. Véronique Bracco’s “The Forest: A Tale of the Fenghuang”, built around East Asian mythology’s phoenix-like firebird, gives cellist Marina Kolovou some of the record’s richest, most grounded playing, anchoring Bracco’s more fantastical melodic writing in real depth. Thomas Bramel’s “Wallingford: Work, Worry, War”, evoking the American Dust Bowl era, is the album’s most emotionally serious statement, and the trio with Tarpagkos handle its weight with real restraint rather than melodrama.
Two multi-part suites make up the back half of the record, and they reveal a different, more playful side of the project. Vincent Kennedy’s triptych “Rain”, “Water” and “Life” packs real character into barely five minutes combined, each movement a tiny, complete gesture rather than a sketch. Vasco M. N. Pereira’s five-part “O jardim extravagante (The Fancy Garden)” goes even further in miniature, its five sections, including the charmingly literal “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not”, never running longer than about two minutes apiece, and the effect is closer to a set of musical postcards than a conventional suite. It’s a genuinely delightful sequence, full of small, specific personality, and it shows off just how nimbly this quartet can shift character from one thirty-second phrase to the next. David Martynuik’s closing “Humoresque”, reportedly written to reflect the personalities of the performers themselves, sends the album out on a genuinely affectionate, good-humoured note, a fitting way to close a record so clearly built on mutual regard between composers and players.
Listeners who’ve followed the Galan Trio through their ambitious Kinesis commissioning project will find something worth noting here: where the three Kinesis volumes (*) were built on the idea of restless, undirected movement, often unsettled, sometimes deliberately dissonant, always exploratory, Embrace feels like the same trio’s other register entirely. If anything, hearing Embrace alongside the Kinesis volumes only deepens the impression of just how versatile Bouras, Karasavvidis and Kolovou really are, equally persuasive whether the brief calls for controlled chaos or, as it does here, genuine warmth.
(*) Kinesis, Vol.1 review – Kinesis, Vol.2 review – Kinesis, Vol.3 review
Embrace succeeds because it never mistakes accessibility for shallowness. These are carefully crafted pieces, performed with real chemistry by four musicians clearly enjoying each other’s company, and the album’s underlying philosophy – that connection between composer, performer and listener is worth building toward, not something to be suspicious of – comes through in every phrase. In a year full of records demanding your intellectual attention, this one simply asks for your ear and rewards it generously. A genuinely lovely, deeply satisfying release.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 15th, 2026
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Album on Neuma Records’ website
Musicians:
Galan Trio:
Babis Karasavvidis – violin
Marina Kolovou – violoncello
Petros Bouras – piano
Special guest:
Zacharias Tarpagkos – flute
Tracklitsing:
1.Garry D. W. Judd: In the Light of Greece (and the Parthenon Sculptures) 05:35
2.Ilan Chouraki: George in Paris: Andante | Allegro | Adagio | Presto 08:11
3.Igor Vorobyov: Spring on the Ladoga 07:56
4.Véronique Bracco: The Forest: A Tale of the Fenghuang 08:18
5.Thomas Bramel: Wallingford: Work, Worry, War 08:51
6.Vincent Kennedy: Rain 01:25
7.Vincent Kennedy: Water 01:50
8.Vincent Kennedy: Life 02:20
9.Vasco M. N. Pereira: O jardim extravagante – The Fancy Garden: Purple Longing 02:13
10.Vasco M. N. Pereira: O jardim extravagante – The Fancy Garden: Lily of the Field 01:59
11.Vasco M. N. Pereira: O jardim extravagante – The Fancy Garden: Dwarf Morning Glory 01:47
12.Vasco M. N. Pereira: O jardim extravagante – The Fancy Garden: Marigold 00:40
13.Vasco M. N. Pereira: O jardim extravagante – The Fancy Garden: She Loves Me, Sho Loves Me Not 02:05
14.David Martynuik: Humoresque 05:43
