Daimon: Piano Concerto, Ithaca Suite & Sonatina for Nausicaa

Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic tale of its hero’s long journey home from the Trojan Wars, closes the gap between the Bronze Age and the age of AI. The story of Odysseus’ perilous quest inspired Olivia Belli to compose Daimon, a piano concerto cast in a contemporary neo-classical style adorned with traces of the Italian Baroque, the character studies of Ithaca Suite and the lyrical miniatures of Sonatina for Nausicaa. A thread of tender beauty runs through the composer-pianist’s music, present even in her Suite’s “Proci”, an edgy string-quartet depiction of the suitors who besiege Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. It’s there, too, in the yearning violin that soars above the complex cross-rhythms of “Telemachus” and the haunting melancholy of Jess Gillam’s sax solo in “Eumaeus”. Daimon conveys the heartfelt emotional states aroused by the Ithacan king’s nostalgia for hearth and home, the many obstacles that impede his way and the tests of mind and body that follow his homecoming, all interwoven in the work’s deeply moving, ultimately triumphant finale.