Festival

Vasilis Stavrakakis & Psarogiorgis at Vamos

Two of the biggest names in Cretan music in a school courtyard in Vamos, for ten euros. That is not a normal line-up.

Vasilis Stavrakakis is one of the great living voices of the rizitiko, the unaccompanied mountain song tradition of western Crete, and Giorgis Xylouris, known everywhere as Psarogiorgis, is the laouto player who has taken Cretan music onto stages from Melbourne to London. Both of them, plus Giannis Papatzanis and Stelios Petrakis, in the courtyard of the Vamos high school, for ten euros. If you only understand one thing about how this island treats its music, let it be that a line-up like this plays a school yard in a village of a thousand people and nobody finds it strange.