Kostas Rekleitis

Kostas Rekleitis began his formal training at the National Conservatory of Greece. He subsequently earned a Bachelor’s of Music at the University of Edinburgh, a Masters of Music at the Royal Holloway University of London, and a PhD at the Edinburgh University. He has studied harmony and counterpoint with Spyros Klapsis and John Kitchen and composition with Nigel Osborne, Peter Nelson, Marina Adamia, Philip Cashian, and film music with Brian Lock.

Kostas’s main output includes a cantata based on C. P. Cavafy poetry (an arranged for piano part of the cantata has been performed in a series of concerts in Universities in the US including Yale, Brown, Columbia, and Harvard), also cycles of songs in Ancient Greek, English, Italian, Greek, French, Hebrew, and Japanese text; also a piano and a cello concerto. His composition “Aerialistic Piano Trio” received critical acclaim and was premiered by the Zagreb Trio in Vienna, representing Greece at the MINSTREL cultural event in 2012. Also, his orchestral song Subito has been selected among others for the International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM, Beijing 2018.

Equally comfortable with music beyond the concert hall, Kostas Rekleitis has written music for musicals, theatre, shows, made numerous orchestral arrangements, and collaborated with visual artists for short videos and art exhibitions where he performed as pianist and cellist. Kostas has been fortunate to collaborate with musicians as The Edinburgh Quartet, mezzosoprano Lore Lixenberg, soprano Peyee Chen, Italian pianist Angelo Aliberti, members of Greek State Orchestra, conductor James Lowe (current Spokane Symphony), musical director and writer David Levin, soprano Stella Markou and Alla Voskobovnikova (Univ. of Missouri-St Louis), Scottish mezzosoprano Christina Dunwoodie, clarinettist Jean Jonhson, English flutist Carla Rees, pianist Billie Whittaker, and others.

During the years Kostas has built an interest in words and as a result a total of 120 songs in various forms have been created; from piano, to symphonic accompaniment. Soon after he settled to USA, he set three poems by the American poets Morgan Segal, Natalie J Graham, Sarah Maclay, and Diane Suess. Works in progress include musical setting on poetic text by Smadar Sharett, Colin Donati, Gustavo Hernandez, and Anne Carson.