For near 30 years, Elisa Vasilas dreamed of taking Australian musicians to Greece. This September, that dream finally becomes reality when the Perth violinist and arts administrator travels to the tiny Dodecanese island of Chalki as Music Liaison and Manager for the Darlington String Quartet, invited to perform at the ‘5th Chalki Music Festival – Dimitris Kremastinos.’
The festival runs under the patronage of Greek President Konstantinos Tasoulas and the artistic direction of conductor Nikos Haliassas, heads the Athens State Orchestra. Titled “Musical Roots” the five-day festival unfolds across the island’s landmark sites, tracing a path from traditional music into contemporary expression and using that melismatic journey to spotlight the cultural threads connecting different peoples, eras and musical idioms.
And Chalki is a very personal thread that runs through Elisa Vasilas’s family.
“Chalki is a tiny little island, an hour from Rhodes, where my dad was born,” Vasilas says.
Roots in two islands
Vasilas’s connection to the Dodecanese is deep, and personal. Her paternal grandmother, Persephone, was from Chalki and a highly educated, Greek-language schoolteacher, brought out from Greece in the 1950s at a time when it was unusual for a woman to hold such a position.
“She was very highly educated, and in those days it was quite unusual for a woman,” Vasilas says.
“She was a Greek schoolteacher here for very many years and was very well respected, and until this day people still speak about her.”
Persephone also taught mandolin. “The music side maybe came from her,” she says. The two instruments, violin and mandolin, are like bookends in the family’s story of migration and memory.
Her mother’s side traces back to Kastellorizo and carries a traumatic story. During the Second World War, as Italian bombing forced islanders to evacuate, the family, under British control at the time, was relocated to a refugee camp in Gaza, where they lived for three years.
“They had to leave, evacuate the island of Kastellorizo because of it being destroyed by the [bombing],” Vasilas explains.
“Kastellorizo was under British rule, like they were a protectorate, and they were taken to Palestine, to Gaza, and my mother was born.”
The family long believed her mother was born in the refugee camp itself, but “we found out recently she was actually born in the hospital of Nazareth”, at the very end of the war.
When the family was finally able to leave the camp and sail home, they travelled on a ship called the Empire Patrol, which caught fire at sea.
“A lot of people were jumping ship, they drowned, they died,” Vasilas says.
“My uncles were in the water for 36 hours. My grandmother had six children, so she was lowered into a life raft with my mum as a baby.”
The family was eventually reunited and settled in Perth by the mid-to-late 1940s, a resettlement made easier by the fact that her father’s and mother’s families already knew one another from Kastellorizo.
It is against this background that Vasilas describes her continuing link to Rhodes and Chalki. Her maternal grandmother, she adds, “carried the trauma of those years too heavily to want to return” often, “so her desire to go back to Kastellorizo wasn’t on the same level” as her paternal grandmother’s connection to Chalki. That imbalance, in a strange way, is part of what has driven Vasilas herself back towards the island for decades.
Photo: Depositphotos
From performer to impresario
Vasilas trained as a violinist at the WA Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) before winning a scholarship in the mid-1990s to undertake postgraduate orchestral and violin studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
She had already been playing with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra before heading overseas.
While in England, a shoulder injury born of constant violin playing began to end her performance career. Yet her innate and deep love of music created an unexpected second calling.
“It began to bother me when I was in England, performing,” she says. The repetitive strain of playing was having a damaging impact.
Her uncle, then deputy head of Holland Park School in London, asked her to help liaise between the school and universities across England as students moved from secondary into tertiary study.
Clearly, the threads of the Hellenic diaspora, as they often do, provide global links. In Vasilas’s case from Greece to Australia and, in turn, to England on the wings of migration.
In hindsight, Vasilas sees the two threads as connected. “This parallel sort of world that I was working in, in education, without realising, was rebirthing something new, a new sort of passion for something, but it was still related, if that makes sense.”
She describes the shift as a natural evolution, not a loss.
“I think it’s very important as a musician, or as an artist, that you’re able to do that, to have a lot of skills under your belt,” she says.
“For me, what I loved the most was liaising with universities, engaging with students, being able to share my skill based on my knowledge of not just music, but using those skills beyond that.”
After returning to Greece to teach for some years, Vasilas met the man who was to be her future husband in Rhodes, but like her, a diaspora Greek born in Adelaide, and with him came back to Perth in 1999. She resumed performing “at a certain capacity”, and completed a graduate diploma in education.
For nearly 10 years now, she has been Education and Administration Manager at the WA Youth Orchestra (WAYO), which she describes as “a substantial role”, one that draws on everything she has accumulated across three decades in music.
The call that started it all
The Chalki connection found her, not other way around. “I didn’t know this man, Niko,” Vasilas confesses. Nikos Haliassas artistic director and principal conductor of the Athens Camerata Junior Orchestra, artistic director of the Dodecanese’s “MusiKos” International Music Festival, is artistic director of the Chalki Music Festival.
“I think my connection with Chalki, because we visit Chalki so often. They knew my background. It is a small island, I guess they see on my socials what my role is, and then they know I’m from Chalki, and then they make that connection.”
The original plan, a year earlier, had been to take a group of WAYO students to Chalki, but the cost of transporting 15 young musicians made it unworkable.
“That didn’t happen, which was devastating for me and the musicians,” she says.
“However, I didn’t want to cut the link.”
The Darlington String Quartet, mentors to WAYO’s young players and personal friends, were in Vasilas’s mind the obvious next call.
“The thought came to my mind, should I ask them? They are the teachers of a lot of the kids I was going to take. They immediately said ‘yes’. They were going off the back of a tour that they wanted to create that was starting in England.”
Extending that tour to Greece, was simply a matter of asking, “You guys are going to England anyway — why not go to Greece?”
“I’m taking the Darlington String Quartet, who are the quartet in residence at WAAPA, and they are very, very dear friends of mine. I studied with most of them.”
Musical roots
This year’s Chalki Music Festival, running from September 8 to 12 under the theme ‘Musical Roots’, explores the origins of musical tradition and its evolution into contemporary expression. The Quartet will perform on September 10 in the courtyard of Agios Nikolaos, “a beautiful spot, because everything’s outside,” Vasilas says.
The program was shaped closely around Haliassas’s brief for the year.
“Niko wanted something that was drawing from Australia,” Vasilas says.
“It has to be music that is reflective of the theme, a lot of folk-based sort of music, and there are Australian composers as well that they’re highlighting.”
The set includes an Australian work by composer Alice Chance, ‘The Nose Scrunch Reel’, alongside Greek repertoire including Nikos Skalkottas’s ‘Five Greek Dances’.
“I love how we’re highlighting the different folk dances from different regions of Greece,” she says. She then draws a comparison to the Danish String Quartet’s reworkings of Nordic and Scandinavian material as a kindred approach.
Vasilas says that the connections between folk traditions run deeper than geography.
“You can hear the similarities throughout, I don’t think there’s much difference between any folk music, really, they all have similar roots.” Vasilas says of the musical through-lines linking Greek, Australian and other folk idioms.
The Darlington Quartet’s set runs alongside four other festival concerts across the week: an opening program dedicated to conductor Yiannis Fourlanos featuring the Elysium Duo and Athens State Orchestra clarinetist Spyros Mourikis; an evening with the Haig Yazdjian Quintet exploring the musical roots of the Eastern Mediterranean, Armenia and the Balkans; a tribute to bouzouki legend Giorgos Zambetas performed by the ERT Orchestra of Contemporary Music with Kostas Makedonas; and a closing performance built around the dialogue between folk song and rebetiko.
The Municipality of Chalki, alongside the Athens State Orchestra, has run the festival since 2022 in memory of Dimitris Kremastinos, a physician, academic and lifelong advocate for music education. Mayor Angelos Fragkakis has said the festival aims to offer the island a celebration of music that unites people, generations and cultures, and it was recently recognised as one of 10 “good practice” case studies in European cultural heritage through the European Heritage Hub program.
Funding the dream
While Chalki is covering accommodation, meals and ferry transfers between Rhodes and the island, the quartet is receiving no performance fee, leaving international airfares, freight, insurance and preparation costs to be met independently.
“All they could offer was transfers from Rhodes to Chalki, meals and accommodation — there was no funding,” Vasilas says.
An application for a Creative Australia grant was unsuccessful, a result she finds frustrating, and mostoluy because of the absence of communication.
“Even though we didn’t get it, I would like to know how we could improve on the application,” she says.
Asked whether the rejection reflected broader funding pressures in the sector, she is careful, but pointed.
“Everyone’s struggling. We’re struggling, media’s struggling, artists, you know, we’re struggling as an organisation too.”
Support instead came through a private patron connected to the quartet, along with fundraising from the strong community following the ensemble has built through its regular concerts in the Perth Hills suburb of Darlington, plus support from Perth’s Greek community.
“We’re not actually getting paid ,” she says of the arrangement.
“It’s fine, it’s a start, and we’ll see where it leads. We’re all very passionate, so there’s a lot of in-kind, but it doesn’t really matter at the moment.”
Looking beyond September
For Vasilas and the quartet, Chalki is intended as a beginning. She has taken on an informal role as the quartet’s manager “the fifth member”, she jokes, and both parties hope the trip opens the door to ongoing collaboration.
“This is why the Darlington String Quartet are so good, because they’re professional performers, mentors, teachers, educators, they all want to create a partnership and future collaborations with Greece and other places as well as mentorship programs for young musicians,” she says.
“It doesn’t have to be just performers, composers too. People don’t know where it’s going to lead.”
There is appetite, too, for the quartet to tour further within Australia off the back of the relationships built in Greece.
“They’d love to do more interstate stuff, and I’d love to collaborate more,” Vasilas says, noting the group’s hope to reach audiences beyond Western Australia in the years ahead.
After 25 years of false starts and sheer persistence, Elisa Vasilas is finally bringing her musical Odyssey home, from Perth to Chalki, the island where her story began.
“I’ve been pursuing it 25 years, basically,” she says.
