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| Nana Mouskouri |
She has recorded in a dozen languages including Greek, German, Dutch, English, Welsh, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese and Maori.
She is colloquially said to have been a singer with the voice of an angel and a face only a mother could love.
She persistently refused the urgings of her handlers to shed her trademark thick rimmed eyeglasses and rather dumpy schoolgirl hairdo. But in the end they proved to be no impediment whatever to her wild international success.
Born in Greece in 1934, she was admitted to the Athens Music Conservatory at age 16 to study operatic voice, but was expelled after 9 years when a stodgy professor learned that she was singing at jazz nightclubs at night. Throughout her serious academic studies she had been a secret admirer of the music of American greats, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.
As it turned out, opera's loss was popular music's gain.
She continued singing at a fashionable Athens jazz club and there met a prominent Greek composer, Manos Hadjidakis, who was impressed with her unique voice and began writing songs for her, one of which she sang to win the 1959 Greek Song Festival.
She won a number of other vocal competitions and was signed to a recording contract with Phillips-Fontana records.
In 1961, Mouskouri sang the soundtrack to a German television documentary about Greece. This produced the German-language single Weiße Rosen aus Athen (The White Rose of Athens). The song was originally adapted from a folk melody by Hadjidakis.
It became a colossal success, selling over a million copies in Germany. The song was then translated into several other languages and it went on to become one of Mouskouri's signature tunes.
As a result of this first successful foray into German pop, Mouskouri was adopted by German schlager fans as one of their own and continued to rank high on the schlager music charts well into the 80s.
After a successful worldwide farewell tour, which included US concerts in Florida, New York City and Boston and a dozen Canadian cities,Nana Mouskouri formally retired in 2008 and now resides in Switzerland with her husband, Chapelle.
Here is a German Television clip from the 1960s featuring Nana singing the very beautiful Weiße Rosen aus Athen (The White Rose of Athens).
(Please bear with the rather annoying 21 second German TV introduction and the peculiar little mouse animations that occur in the clip. German TV was rather primitive in the 60s.)
English speaking people can more fully appreciate the incredible beauty of her voice in the treatment of this song by hearing it in their own language. Here is a brief BBC capsule of the song's history which includes her 1974 Royal Albert Hall performance of the English language version, The White Rose of Athens:
Here she sings Lieder, die die Liebe Schreibt (Songs That Write the Love) from her 1981 German hit album, Meine Lieder sind mein Leben:
Nana Mouskouri is still revered by schlager fans throughout the German speaking world and worldwide has to be counted among the greatest pop performers of all time.
2 comments:
Her voice really is very angelic. I was kind of surprised how lovely it is. :)
Yes, it was indeed a lovely voice. Divine, even! The sad thing though is that despite Nana having said goodbye with a farewell world tour from 2006 to 2008 she has recently begun singing again! She seems to have a psychological dependency on being in front of her fans. The live performances are embarrassing. (She is now 77 years old.) However, the two new CDs of 2011 are just about acceptable. You can tell it's a very old lady singing but no doubt the wonders of modern sound engineering have played quite a part.
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