Galan Trio – Kinesis, Vol.2

Contemporary music

Kinesis Vol.2: The Galan Trio’s American Odyssey rolls deeper into new territory

Sequels are a tricky business in any art form, but they’re especially tricky when the original wasn’t really a single artistic statement so much as an ongoing act of discovery. Kinesis, Vol.2, the second double album from Athens’ Galan Trio, doesn’t try to repeat what made the first volume work. Instead, it does something better: it keeps traveling. Where Vol.1 commissioned composers from the American Southeast and Northeast, this second chapter pushes the trio’s map further inward, gathering twelve new works from composers based in the Midwest and South Central United States, and the result is, if anything, an even more sprawling and confident record than its predecessor.

The album is structured geographically, and that structure gives it a genuinely satisfying shape. Disc One, subtitled “Midwest,” opens with Brooke Joyce’s “Mirror/Καθρέπτης”, a piece of introspective reflection whose bilingual title (Greek for “mirror”) nods directly back toward the trio’s own roots, before moving through Daniel Powers’s atmospheric “Before the Fragile Gradual Throne of Night,” which takes its title from an e.e. cummings line and unfolds from delicate atonal unease into extended, settled tonal consonance. Dylan Findley’s “Ánimo” injects real energy and lightness into the sequence, while Alex Lubet’s “Elusive” stands out for its colourful, unpredictable turns of harmony. Ellen Haupert’s “Variant Mary” reworks the old Welsh lullaby “Suo Gân” against the backdrop of the Omicron variant, a small, quietly moving detail once you know it’s there, and Navid Bargrizan’s microtonal “Tuning Exercise No. 8” is the disc’s most genuinely radical inclusion, its tuning drawn in part from an admiration for Jethro Tull and pushing the ensemble into territory well outside conventional tonal writing. Jeffrey Kowalkowski and Pantelis Bolarakis’s “Enin Modnar” and Randy Bauer’s rhythmically alive “Moto” close out the first disc on a suitably restless note.

Disc Two, “South Central,” shifts in tone toward more expansive, multi-movement writing. Larry Alan Smith’s three-movement “Piano Trio No. 3” is a genuine centerpiece, dense, dramatic, and unusually rich in emotional range across its Allegro con insistenza, Adagio and Allegro con spirito. Richard Lavenda’s two-part “Piano Trio” contrasts a driving first movement against a more spacious second, and Dominic Dousa’s “Three Sketches on the Artwork of Tom Lea” translates the murals of the great Texas-El Paso painter into three vivid musical vignettes, tracing a Franciscan friar, the Comanche people, and the desert landscape itself with real narrative clarity. The album closes on Brian Bondari’s “Persian Dances,” a three-part suite that folds Persian and Western classical idioms together with real warmth, ending the whole two-disc journey on a genuinely joyful, dance-driven note.

None of this regional storytelling would carry any weight without musicians capable of finding the emotional throughline in twelve entirely different compositional voices, and that remains the Galan Trio’s great strength.
Pianist Petros Bouras, an Athens-born composer and chamber musician in his own right, has performed everywhere from the Athens Concert Hall to CCRMA at Stanford and was the first Greek pianist to perform on China’s “piano island” of Gulangyu, a résumé that speaks to exactly the kind of stylistic range this repertoire demands.
Violinist Babis Karasavvidis carries a background running through the European Union Youth Orchestra, performances at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and Vienna Konzerthaus under major conductors, and his current post as Associate Concertmaster of the Greek National Opera Orchestra.
Cellist Marina Kolovou, a founding trio member and more than fifteen-year veteran of the Greek National Opera Orchestra (five of them as Principal Cellist), brings the same expressive depth that’s made her one of Greece’s most admired chamber musicians, praised by critics for playing marked by purity of tone and natural coherence.

It’s that combination, three musicians equally at home in grand orchestral repertoire and in intimate new commissions, that lets Kinesis, Vol.2 move as fluidly as it does between Bargrizan’s microtonal experimentation and Bondari’s Persian-inflected dance suite without ever losing its footing. This is a trio that treats stylistic range not as a stunt but as a genuine expression of who they are as musicians.

If Kinesis, Vol.1 was about capturing undirected movement born of isolation, Vol.2 feels like the sound of that movement finding real direction, an expedition through the American musical landscape that’s just as interested in local colour (a Welsh lullaby, a Texas muralist, ancient Persian dance forms) as it is in pure compositional craft. It’s a remarkably varied, endlessly engaging listen, generous in scope and never merely academic, and it more than earns comparisons already being made to the very best of what’s happening in contemporary chamber music today.

Anyone who enjoyed the first volume owes it to themselves to keep traveling with the Galan Trio into this one, and anyone who hasn’t yet heard either now has two excellent reasons to start.

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, September 14th, 2026

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To order the album

Album on Neuma Records’ website

Musicians :
Petros Bouras: Piano
Babis Karasavvidis: Violin
Marina Kolovou: Cello

GALAN TRIO website

Tracklisting:

CD1 – Midwest