The present recording unites two very different works by Mikis Theodorakis. The ballet suite created between 1947 and 1953 and originally entitled Greek Carnaval, and the elegiac composition Raven of 1970, music set to a poem by the famous Greek poet and Nobel Prize winner Giorgos Seferis, the final version of which was not completed before 1993. Both works were not only created in different decades, but also have a completely different character and form. While Carnaval, the final title, is symphonic programme music, Raven is a kind of lyric "orchestral song" for mezzo-soprano, flute, harps and string orchestra, or, as Mikis Theodorakis himself wrote in the programme of the world premiere of Raven, 'an unusual work within my complete œuvre as to its form, a kind of musical dream, standing out, beyond reality'.
