Greece - the musical

It has been a couple of millennia in the making, but Robert Thicknesse has finally reconstructed an ancient Greek chorus line.

"Greek tragedy is an odd form of drama because the plot keeps getting interrupted by this chorus, who keep insisting on singing and dancing," Taplin continues. It sounds more like a musical than an opera, "except the choruses weren't part of the plot; more a kind of meditation on it, like the chorales in a Bach Passion".

Greece - the musical In a sense, Greek chant is not unlike Gregorian chant. The chorus (of 12 or 15 men) sang in unison, accompanied by a double-reed instrument called an aulete - and by all accounts, danced at the same time, albeit a stately, tai-chi-style dancing of the sort you might see in a Robert Wilson production. "It's hard to say whether different composers had different styles," says Taplin. "The rhythm of the music follows the rhythm of the words, so in a sense there's less freedom."

Panufnik agrees: "The words drive you forward. The biggest difficulty for me was that I couldn't modulate to another key, which we are sort of conditioned to do and which gives music a shape and direction. Here that is all provided by the words, the drama."