This is the world premiere performance of Geoffrey Gordon's Aphrodite and Eros (fighting off the advances of Pan), for violin and cello, with violinist Yuri Revich and cellist Benedict Klöckner, from the International Music Festival Koblenz 2020 (IMUKO).
This work is inspired by a sculpture dating from ca. 100 BC, from Delos, now housed in the Exhibition Room of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.
Notes from the museum curator:
The naked goddess of beauty and love is rendered frontally with hair well-combed and tied up by means of a scarf bound in a bow above her parting. The manner in which she bends her left leg lends a gracefulness to her stance. She holds her left hand in front of her pubic triangle which she is trying to cover or protect with her palm from the indiscreet intentions of the philanderer Pan, while she brandishes her sandal in her raised right hand in an attempt to deter him. The goat-footed, horned god has seized her left wrist with his sinewy left hand. He leans on a tree trunk covered with an animal's skin and has left his hunting stick (lagobolon) at the foot of the tree. The little, winged son of Aphrodite, Eros, is trying to repulse Pan by grasping his right horn. On the low base of the group an inscription is carved 'Dionysos, son of Zenon who was son Theodoros, from Beirut dedicated [this offering] to the ancestral gods for his own benefit and that of his children'.
