Eleni Karaindrou wrote this score for Eternity and a Day, the Theo Angelopoulos film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1998. It was her fourth ECM album of music for his films, after Music for Films, The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses' Gaze. As on those records, the cues are not presented as a plain soundtrack but rearranged into a continuous work that can be heard without the images.
The music was recorded in March and April 1998 at the Athens Concert Hall, with the string orchestra La Camerata Athens directed by Loukas Karytinos. Karaindrou plays piano, and the soloists include the oboist Vangelis Christopoulos and the clarinettist Manthos Halkias, alongside French horn, bassoon, mandolin and accordion. Manfred Eicher produced the album and shaped its sequence. Karaindrou has said that he took her pieces and made out of them a new work that belongs to him as well.
The film follows a dying poet, played by Bruno Ganz, through one last day in a rainy Thessaloniki, where he takes in a young Albanian refugee. The score answers with Greek folk colours, above all the clarinet, sometimes keening alone and sometimes hovering over a drone of strings. Hearing the Time opens on violin, cello, accordion and strings, and Karaindrou's short piano solo By the Sea leads into the Eternity Theme, where the oboe lies over mandolin and winds. The theme returns in several variations through the album. The traditional Wedding Dance, for Pontic lyra and accordion, was recorded on location at the port of Thessaloniki.
Reviewing it for MusicWeb International in 2002, Gary S. Dalkin singled out By the Sea, the clarinet elegy To a Dead Friend and the closing Depart. Raoul Hernandez of The Austin Chronicle wrote of the record's "haunting elegance" in 1999. The earlier Ulysses' Gaze had prompted Time magazine to call Karaindrou "Greece's most eloquent living composer". The same team of soloists and Eicher's sequencing link the two albums closely.
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1692, first released in December 1998, with a booklet of film stills by the cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos.
