| Contemporary music |
Kinesis Vol.1: How the Galan Trio turned lockdown stillness into restless, vivid music.
There’s a certain irony built into the very premise of Kinesis Vol.1. The word itself, borrowed from biology, describes the undirected movement an organism makes in response to a stimulus, and this double album by the Athens-based Galan Trio was born out of the least mobile period most of its listeners will ever live through. Confined by the pandemic lockdowns, pianist Petros Bouras, violinist Babis Karasavvidis and cellist Marina Kolovou responded not by waiting the crisis out, but by reaching across an ocean, commissioning ten brand-new works from American composers, several of them of Greek heritage. The result is one of the most quietly ambitious chamber music projects to emerge from that strange static period, proof that motion, in music, doesn’t need an actual room to travel through.
What makes Kinesis Vol.1 so rewarding is how differently each composer interprets the trio’s brief. This isn’t a collection of pieces loosely filed under a shared title, it’s ten genuinely distinct responses to the same open question about what movement means, musically and emotionally, after a long period of enforced stillness.
Paul Richards’ “Hairpin Turn” opens the album with real momentum, its dancing keys and playfully agitated pulse against carefully plucked cello setting an immediately winning tone. Martin Gendelman’s “Ictus” follows with something colder and more cinematic, a haunting and long-shadowed piece built on firm piano writing that lingers rather than resolves. Nickitas Demos’s “Prelude of What Follows the Death of Tomorrow” carries a title heavy enough to match its weight, while Scott Robbins’ “Look of Sky” gives Bouras some of the album’s most intimate playing, set against Karasavvidis’s quivering, weightless strings.
Yiorgos Vassilandonakis’s “Cyanic Outbursts” leans into an Eastern European melancholy that lets the strings really yearn, and Ken Steen’s “Attempting to Conjure Joy” opens the second disc on a genuinely uplifting note, its flowing piano lines paired with soaring violin that earns its title outright. John Levey’s three-part “Ghost Town Sounds” is one of the record’s real high points: stately, panoramic, dreamlike, with the strings drifting through its three brief movements (Blacklick, Claghorn, Buena Vista) like a slow pan across an empty landscape. Todd Groves’ “Dance Music for a Frenetic Mind” does exactly what its title promises, restless and propulsive in a way that snaps the album’s mood back toward urgency, and Matthew Greenbaum’s “Chaconne from a Distance” brings a more classical formal discipline to bear on the same themes of isolation and reach. The album closes with David Martynuik’s two-part “Kinematic Contraption,” which ends things on a genuinely dynamic, focused high, the Vivace and Andante con moto movements giving the whole collection a satisfying architectural close.
None of this would land nearly as well without musicians capable of inhabiting ten completely different compositional voices convincingly, and that’s exactly what the Galan Trio brings to the table. Founded in Athens in 2012, the name itself drawn from a word meaning to enchant, to cry, to sing, to scream like a gale, the trio has spent over a decade building a reputation for pushing at the edges of the classical piano trio format rather than simply maintaining it.
Pianist Petros Bouras is as much a composer and genre omnivore as a performer. He’s collaborated with film composer Shigeru Umebayashi, played with the Greek band StarWound, and became the first Greek pianist to perform on China’s famed “piano island” of Gulangyu, alongside a career writing for theatre and film across Europe.
Violinist Babis Karasavvidis brings a pedigree that runs through the European Union Youth Orchestra and stages like the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and Vienna Konzerthaus, under conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy, before settling into his current role as Associate Concertmaster of the Greek National Opera Orchestra.
And cellist Marina Kolovou, a founding member of the trio and a veteran of more than fifteen years with the Greek National Opera Orchestra, including five as Principal Cellist, brings the kind of expressive precision one critic described as possessing “a naturally singing coherence”, exactly the quality this repertoire needs to keep ten different compositional worlds from feeling disjointed.
That combination of backgrounds (orchestral rigor, contemporary sensibility, and a genuine appetite for new commissions) is what makes the Galan Trio such a natural home for a project like this. They don’t just play these pieces accurately; they inhabit them, shifting from the eerie tension of “Ictus” to the folk-adjacent warmth of “Ghost Town Sounds” without ever losing their own collective identity underneath.
Kinesis, Vol.1 succeeds because it never settles for easy contrast. It captures genuine, “undirected” emotional movement, restlessness, isolation, occasional joy, quiet dread, through ten composers’ very different lenses, held together by a trio disciplined and versatile enough to make the whole thing feel like a single coherent statement rather than a sampler. It’s clever rather than cacophonous, moving rather than merely well-played, and it stands as one of the more genuinely inventive commissioning projects to come out of the pandemic era. A rich, rewarding listen, and a fine first chapter in what would go on to become a much larger American odyssey for this exceptional trio.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 14th, 2026
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Album on Neuma Records’ website
Musicians :
Petros Bouras: Piano
Babis Karasavvidis: Violin
Marina Kolovou: Cello
Tracklisting:
1.Paul Richards: Hairpin Turn 13:08
2.Martin Gendelman: Ictus 09:33
3.Nickitas Demos: Prelude of What Follows the Death of Tomorrow 08:22
4.Scott Robbins: Look of Sky 08:37
5.Yiorgos Vassilandonakis: Cyanic Outbursts 07:28
6.Ken Steen: Attempting to Conjure Joy 15:13
7.John Levey: Ghost Town Sounds, I. Blacklick 02:53
8.John Levey: Ghost Town Sounds, II. Claghorn 02:56
9.John Levey: Ghost Town Sounds, III. Buena Vista 02:39
10.Todd Groves: Dance Music for a Frenetic Mind 09:23
11.Matthew Greenbaum: Chaconne from a Distance 05:05
12.David Martynuik: Kinematic Contraption, I. Vivace 03:50
13.David Martynuik: Kinematic Contraption, II. Variations – Andante con moto 04:40
