There is no person, a lover of cinema, a simple music lover, even a television viewer or a frequenter of great sport who has not known and loved Vangelis , perhaps even without his name being familiar to him.
The generation of the '60s danced and fell in love to the tune of " Rain and Tears " with the broken vocals of Demis Roussos or " It's Five o'clock "; those who grew up in the 80s have throbbed following the race to victory of " Moments of glory ", marked by the epic crescendo of music that has traveled the world even ending up in a commercial spot. Those who are moved by seeing the desperate loneliness of the " Blade Runner " replicant still have the heartbreaking melody that connotes it in their heads. And whoever has participated or seen on TV the World Cup in Korea / Japan will never forget the official theme of that unfortunate (for Totti's Italy) expedition.
Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassío , who died yesterday in hospital in Paris at the age of 79 after being hit by Covid , is the author of all this.
Born in Thessaly (in Agria) on 29 March 1943, the musician and composer in one of his very rare interviews attributed to his father his passion for music which led him to invent his first home concert at just 4 years old, using the radio , the pots, the glasses. Self-taught convinced, he said that his roots remained linked to traditional Greek music, but that jazz had its influence until, at the age of eighteen, he obtained his first Hammond organ as a gift.
Infected by the explosion of pop and rock, he gave birth to his first band, Formynx, in 1963, but success would literally rain on his head five years later, at the head of the progressive band Aphrodite's Child . They met outside Greece because Vangelis had self-exiled himself in '67 upset by the seizure of power by the Colonels and the subsequent dictatorship. With Demis Roussos and the other members of the band he stayed just three years, marked by an unparalleled success.
In the meantime, however, he had found a home in London after a long stay in Paris and the sum of the influences of the two cultures, as well as his adherence to the movements of the "French May" profoundly marked his maturity.
In London he opened his engraving studio in the 70s (he called it "the laboratory"), he gave a clean break to his life as a rocker, rejecting habits such as drugs and alcohol, he began an intense phase of independent research who would later find in Jon Anderson of " Yes " the perfect accomplice in a long and fruitful partnership. In the meantime, however, he had dusted off his passion for soundtracks (cultivated in his youth by collaborating on several Greek films of the early 1960s) and also in this case he had the good fortune to meet the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
In France he had discovered different sounds and cultural models working with Frederic Rossif, Henry Chapier, Robert Fitoussi and seizing a personal success with a great evening at Olympia. But it was in London that fate knocked on his door in the person of director Hugh Hudson with the script of "Moments of Glory " (1980) under his arm. "There was very little money, but I liked Hugh and his producers - he said later - and it was a gift from heaven to work with them. Nobody, however, would have bet a penny on the final result. The key to everything was the use of the synthesizer. when the great orchestras were still in fashion and the idea of an anomalous sound that digs its trace in the mind ".
Millions of records sold, an Oscar and the greatest accolades of English cinema opened the door to Hollywood , led to the collaboration with Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner" and then "1492"), to that with another exile like Costa Gavras ("Missing "). However, his artistic homeland always remained Europe, prompting him to work with Roman Polanski ("Bitter Moon"), Jacques Cousteau and, in the theater, with two legends of Hellenic culture such as Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas. It is no coincidence that his last successful soundtrack collaboration was for "Alexander", the epic reconstruction of classical Greek culture attempted by Oliver Stone in 2004.
He loved science fiction and sought the sounds of space so much that he collaborated with NASA and ESA for space missions, he considered Stephen Hawkins the greatest genius of the new era.
"Mythology, science, space exploration - he said - are subjects that have fascinated me since early childhood. And they are always found, together with the sounds of my homeland, in the music I write".
(Unioneonline / vl)
