Tamara Obrovac & Stefano Battaglia: Apoxyomenos Recomposed

Tamara Obrovac, vocals
Stefano Battaglia, piano

All compositions by: Tamara Obrovac

The music project Apoxyomenos recomposed is based on compositions Tamara Obrovac wrote for the dance performance Apoksiomen at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 2017.
The pieces were reharmonised by Stefano Battaglia and took on their final form during Tamara’s and Stefano’s joint work in Siena at the Accademia musicale Chigiana in 2022 and 2023, when they were also recorded. The song texts are made up of fragments of verses from Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, in Ancient Greek, selected by dramaturge Lada Kaštelan.

The tragedy The Trojan Women, with its themes of war and exile, sadly resonates with the present day as well, evoking emotions such as sadness, despair, pain, surrender, hope, nostalgia, resignation, unrest, and rebellion. The artistic vision of the project is based on the Apoxyomenos (the bronze statue of a young athlete found under the sea near Mali Lošinj after 2,000 years) as a witness to a vanished civilisation, a symbol of a sunken world, an extinct language, a shipwreck, and the metaphysics of the sea as a tomb, but at the same time as a source and continuation of life.

The melodiousness, but also the austerity of Ancient Greek, gave a new dimension to the creative work of this duo, whose filigree performances opened up a new spectrum of expression and prompted the transformation of the compositions into a different musical form that, within their idiom characterised by the fusion of contemporary jazz and improvised music, also brings in elements of classical music.

The release was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the Istria County.