Manos Loizos/ Μάνος Λοΐζος

Manos Loïzos was considered to be one of the most important Greek Cypriot music composers of the 20th century.

He was born on 22 October 1937 to Cypriot immigrants in Alexandria, Egypt. His parents came from the small village of Agioi Vavatsinias, in the district of Larnaca, Cyprus. Loizos moved to Athens at the age of 17 intending to study pharmacology but soon gave up his studies in order to concentrate on his musical career. He was a self-taught musician, with no formal musical arts training. His first recordings were made in 1963 but he started gaining a larger audience after 1967. By 1975 Loizos had become one of the most popular artists in Greek music.

He died on 17 September 1982 in a hospital in Moscow, Soviet Union after suffering several strokes. He was well known for his leftist political ideology and was an outspoken critic of the Greek military junta. He was also an active member of the Greek Communist Party. The year 2007 was declared "Manos Loizos Year" in Greece.

He composed many well-known Greek songs and has co-operated with various important composers, singers and lyricists like Mikis Theodorakis, Haris Alexiou, George Dalaras, Vasilis Papakonstantinou, Christos Leontis, Fondas Ladis, Yannis Negrepontis, Manolis Rasoulis, Giannis Kalatzis, Nazim Hikmet and many others. His best known cooperation was with his very personal friend, lyricist Lefteris Papadopoulos who wrote the lyrics of many of Loizos' most successful hits.

Some of Loizos' most famous songs are :

• "Ola se thymizoun (Everything Reminds Me of You)" Lyrics: Manolis Rassoulis
• "Jamaica" Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos
• "S' Akoloutho (I follow you)" Lyrics: himself
• "To Akordeon (The Accordion)" Lyrics: Yannis Negrepontis
• "O Dromos (The Street)" Lyrics: Kostoula Mitropoulos
• "Che" (dedicated to Che Guevara) Lyrics: himself
• "Ah Helidoni mu (Ah, my swallow)" Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos
• "De Tha Ksanagapiso (I Shall not Love Again)" Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos
• "Paporaki tou Burnova (Paporaki of Burnova)" Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos
• "O Koutalianos" Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos
• "Evdokia" (Instrumental Zeibekiko)

In 1985, a big concert dedicated to his memory took place in the Athens Olympic Stadium, attended by more than 50,000 people. Manos Loizos' songs and music remain popular until today among all ages of the Greek society.

Sursă: Wikipedia

Maria Polydouri/ Μαρία Πολυδούρη

Maria Polydouri was born at Kalamata in 1902. After graduating from high school at Gytheion, she studied law for two years at the University of Athens, while working as a civil servant. In 1925 she went to Paris, and stayed there for three years. In 1928 she returned to Athens ill with tuberculosis; she died in 1930. 

Polydouri was a woman of exceptional talent, greatly admired by her contemporaries both for her beauty and poetry. She published two volumes of poetry, Trills That Are Fading (1928), and Echo Into Chaos (1929). In 1961 her Collected Poems and some fragments from her diary were published with an introduction by Lily Zographou.

Polydouri's poetry is the poetry of passionate emotion. Her way of life had much the same quality. Her acquaintance with the great poet Kostas Karyotakis (1896-1928) seems not only to have provided Polydouri with a model for her poetry but to have spurred her on to a fervent involvement with life. Polydouri was haunted by the loss of her childhood, and her themes took the form of an alarming, desperate cry. She wrote her best poems while ill at the sanatorium „Soteria”. These poems were pervaded by a sense of vitality and thirst for life as well as by her great anxiety that life might be an illusion.

Polydouri's poetry is not polished or elaborate but forceful and full of contradictions. Her language at its best provides glimpses of subtlety, elegance and sensibility, and at its worst lapses into monotony and the commonplace. In all, it touches us very deeply as the tragic outcry of a wounded human being. Kostas Ouranis remarked that the poet who wrote these poems "was in great haste to send her message, and what she had to say was more important than her involvement with vain ornaments. The merit they have transcends literature: they pulsate with a feeling which is profoundly human." Polydouri's themes are beauty and innocence, love and death. In the incessant pursuit of her vision, she has offered us a strikingly rhythmical, fluid, and direct poetic voice.

Athan Anagnostopoulos 

Filmul, produs de ERT, despre viața lui Kostas Karyotakis și despre povestea lui de dragoste cu Maria Polydouri poate fi găsit pe YouTube:

TODAY
Today just before the light filled up the sky, 
far off I heard bells sounding in the city.
Bells . . . why did I notice? As if sowing hate 
the last shadows slowly and dolefully moved on.

Where have I left my sweet, childlike soul,
in what season, with what bell's tune entwined? 
In what season . . . and today to say my prayers 
I stayed on bended knee in sorrow.

A prayer to beauty, to a forgotten mother,
to ignorance, to a smile, to the voice of a dream, 
listening to the day's bell of anguish
which sadly tolled an untimely death.

translated by Georgia Theophillis Noble 

YOUR WORDS
I remember now . . . the memories, floods that drown me, 
wind, darkness.
The words you plucked like flowers, but now they open in me 
bad, deep wounds.

Neither shade, nor dream, which passes
so quickly toward the ruin.
Love, a smoke. Your words, a cloud which sprinkles me 
with drops of sorrow.

My untimely wounds now fester within me.
Memory, a kiss
of betrayal, making some moments of my life smile secretly, 
increasing my despair.

translated by Mollie Boring

Eleni Karaindrou/ Ελένη Καραΐνδρου

Eleni Karaindrou (Greek: Ελένη Καραΐνδρου) (born 1941) is a Greek composer, born in the village of Teichio in Phocis, Central Greece, on November 25, 1941. She is best known for scoring the films of director Theo Angelopoulos.

She moved with her family to Athens when she was eight years old and she studied piano and theory at the Hellenikon Odeion (Hellenic Conservatory). She also attended history and archaeology classes at the university. In 1967 with the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 she moved to Paris where she studied Ethnomusicology and Orchestration and she improvised with Jazz musicians. Then she began to compose popular songs.

In 1974 she returned to Athens where she established a laboratory for traditional instruments and collaborated with the department of Ethnomusicology of the radio. In 1976 she discovered ECM Records, which was at the time the synonym for in depth research, creative richness and freedom for musical schemes. This was a period of high productvity for her. It was at this time she was introduced to music for the theater and the cinema. She stated that this exposure to cinema was a new beginning from where her own personal style emerged and where the relationship between images and movements created a new space for her expression of emotions.

Her first Soundtrack album was released in 1979 for the movie Periplanissis by Chistoforos Christoforis. In 1982 she won the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and was noticed by Theo Angelopoulos, the president of the committee. They collaborated in the last eight films of the Greek director from 1984 to 2008.

Karaidrou was very creative. Until 2008 she had composed music for 18 full-length movies, 35 theatrical productions and 11 Serials and Television film. She had worked also with Chris Marker, Jules Dassinand Margarethe von Trotta. A musician of extraordinary sensibility, she received in 1992 the Premio Fellini by Europa cinema.

(Sursă: Wikipedia)

Curs de limbă greacă

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