Greek singer Demis Roussos dies aged 68

January 27, 2015

Greek singer Demis Roussos, who sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, has died aged 68, the Hygeia Hospital in Athens has confirmed to the BBC.

Demis Roussos in one of his famous kaftans. (Photo: George Wilkes Archive / Getty Images)

He was best known for his solo hits in the 1970s and 80s, including Forever and Ever, Goodbye and Quand je t'aime.

He was also a member of progressive rock group Aphrodite's Child.

Roussos was renowned for his off-screen role in Mike Leigh's 1977 TV play Abigail's Party, having provided the party's soundtrack.

He had been in the private hospital with an undisclosed illness for some time, and died surrounded by his family.

His Aphrodite's Child bandmate Vangelis paid tribute in a statement that begins: 

"Demis my friend.

"I have just arrived in London and I've been told that you decide to take the long voyage, I'm shocked because I can't believe that this happened so soon.

"Nature gave you this magic voice of yours which made millions of people around the world very happy."

He added: "As for me, I keep those special memories that we share together those early days and I wish you to be happy wherever you are."

He signed off with the words: "Goodbye my friend goodbye. Love Vangelis.”

Greek singer Nana Mouskouri paid tribute on French radio RTL: "He had a superb voice, he travelled in the world ... he loved what he was doing.

"He was an artist, a friend. I hope he is in a better world."

Finding fame

The singer was born Artemios Ventouris Roussos in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1946, to a Greek father and Egyptian mother of Italian origin.

He was raised there until his parents moved to Greece in the early 60s after losing their possessions during the Suez Crisis.

Roussos began his music career at 17, when he joined the a band called The Idols, where he met Vangelis.

Aphrodite's Child produced three albums including It's Five O'Clock and 666, and enjoyed huge success in Europe in the late 1960s, especially France.

Roussos went on to enjoy a successful solo career, topping the charts in several countries with Forever And Ever in 1973, before doing the same in the UK in 1976.

Memorably he was referred to in Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, by the character played by Alison Steadman, who plays his record in an attempt to impress her guests - commenting that he "doesn't sound" fat.

Demis Roussos was still performing on stage in 2012. (Photo: Getty Images)

Other solo hits include My Friend the Wind, My Reason, Someday Somewhere and Happy To Be On An Island In The Sun.

Roussos' fondness for kaftans saw him dubbed "the Kaftan King" and he often wore them for his performances on shows such as Top of the Pops.

He was also famous for his vocal adaptation of the score from the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, which had been composed by Vangelis.

In 1978, he decided to keep a lower profile and moved to Malibu Beach in the US - where he shed much of the weight that had seen him routinely mocked by comedians like Freddie Starr.

Famously, he was caught up in a plane hijacking when flight TWA 847 from Athens to Rome was hijacked by members of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in 1985.

He and his third wife were held at gunpoint for five days before they were released. Some of his fellow passengers endured 17 days in captivity.

The experience changed his life and afterwards he decided the best way he could help others and promote understanding in the world was by returning to music.

He released his album The Story of Demis Roussos not long after.

The star is survived by his mother, Olga (94), children Emily and Cyril, long-term partner Dominique, brother Costas and ex-wives Pamela and Monique.

A funeral will be held on Friday, 30 January in Athens, his manager Denis Vaughan told the BBC.

"We will miss the amazing Demis, whose singing brought sunshine to the world," Vaughan added.

"He was a legend. He played hard, he worked hard. The world is a less fun place without Demis”.

First published at BBC News, January 27, 2015

Sistine Chapel becomes recording studio for papal choir’s newest CD

Boys in the Sistine Chapel choir are seen as Pope Francis leads a penitential liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in this 2014 file photo. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — One of the oldest choirs in the world recorded a CD of their repertoire of sacred music surrounded by the famed frescoes of Michelangelo, Perugino, Pinturicchio and Botticelli.

Marking the first professional studio recording to take place in the Sistine Chapel, the pope’s Sistine Chapel Choir features on a new CD titled, “Cantate Domino.”

Produced by Deutsche Grammophon and Universal Music Italia, the new 16-track CD was released Sept. 25 with the proceeds earmarked for the poor through the pope’s charitable efforts.

Cantate Domino on Deutsche Grammophon, released September 25, 2015

The Sistine Chapel Choir, made up of 20 men and 30 boys, sings music that had been written specifically for papal celebrations in the Sistine Chapel and for the papal choir during the Renaissance.

The Pope's choir has 20 adult singers and 30 boy choristers. Photo: Osservatore Romano

The pieces include Gregorian chant and works by Renaissance masters Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Orlande de Lassus and Felice Anerio. It also features a world premiere recording of Gregorio Allegri’s original composition of “Miserere” — found archived in a codex from 1661 in the Vatican Library.

Msgr. Massimo Palombella — director of the Sistine Chapel Choir — said in a press release Sept. 28: “It is my hope that these masterworks will touch millions of listeners worldwide, and connect them to the historical culture and deep spirituality of the Catholic Church.”

He told Vatican Radio that the pontifical choir, which traces back to the 1470s, is dedicated today to making its music known beyond the walls of Vatican City and to helping people experience “the Lord, salvation, evangelization” through sacred music.

YouTube: Sistine Chapel Choir - Cantate Domino (English trailer)

Deutsche Grammophon president Mark Wilkinson hands the first copy of Cantate Domino
to His Holiness Pope Francis, 2015

Meanwhile, San Paolo Multimedia will be releasing sometime in November, “Wake Up!” a rock album featuring Pope Francis’ words and prayers.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told reporters Sept. 29 that San Paolo had permission to use the voice of the pope for the album, which is being distributed by the label, Believe Digital, and is being made available on iTunes.

Layered over original scores of pop and prog-rock music are original Vatican Radio recordings of Pope Francis as he delivered, live, important talks or prayers in four languages.

For example, “Wake Up!”, the title song featured on the album, uses a clip of the pope from his homily during Mass with young people in South Korea in August 2014. Speaking in English, the pope says, “I don’t like to see young people who are sleeping. No! Wake up! Go! Go forward! Dear young people, ‘God, our God, has blessed us.’”

First published at The Catholic Sun, September 29, 2015

The lost genius of Mozart's sister

Nannerl Mozart was a child prodigy like her brother Wolfgang Amadeus, but her musical career came to an end when she was 18. A one-woman play puts her back on the stage, where she belongs.

Mozart family portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, circa 1780

by Silvia Milo

Tue 8 Sept 2015

I am writing to you with an erection on my head and I am very much afraid of burning my hair”, wrote Nannerl Mozart to her brother Wolfgang Amadeus. What was being erected was a large hairdo on top of Nannerl’s head, as she prepared to pose for the Mozart family portrait.

It was that hairdo that drew my attention. Nine years ago I was visiting Vienna for the 250th birthday celebrations of Wolfgang Amadeus, and I was thrilled to explore the city following in Wolfi’s footsteps, many of which turned out to be Nannerl’s as well. At the Mozarthaus Vienna – Wolfgang’s apartment – on the exit wall, as if by an afterthought, there was a little copy of the Mozart family portrait. I saw a woman seated at the harpsichord next to Wolfgang, their hands intertwined, playing together.

I grew up studying to become a violinist. Neither my music history nor my repertoire included any female composers. With my braided hair I was called “little Mozart” by my violin teacher, but he meant Wolfi. I never heard that Amadeus had a sister. I never heard of Nannerl Mozart until I saw that family portrait.

I was intrigued and determined to find out more. I read Wolfgang Mozart biographies, studied the situation of women and female artists during Mozarts’ time and in different countries, read writings of Enlightenment philosophers, conduct manuals … But the richest source of information came from the Mozart family letters. There are hundreds, and we have them because Nannerl preserved them. 

Most are written by Leopold and Wolfgang but some of Nannerl’s letters survived as well. Through these letters, sometimes only from the replies to her lost letters, Nannerl slowly emerged. I was able to understand the Mozarts as people, as a family, and through the lens of the times and the social situation in which they lived. I saw Nannerl’s potential, her dreams, her strength, grace and her fight.

Sylvia Milo as Nannerl Mozart in The Other Mozart

Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. 

A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation. And so she was left behind in Salzburg, and her father only took Wolfgang on their next journeys around the courts of Europe. Nannerl never toured again.

But the woman I found did not give up. She wrote music and sent at least one composition to Wolfgang and Papa – Wolfgang praised it as “beautiful” and encouraged her to write more. Her father didn’t, as far as we know, say anything about it.

Did she stop? None of her music has survived. Perhaps she never showed it to anybody again, perhaps she destroyed it, maybe we will find it one day, maybe we already did but it’s wrongly attributed to her brother’s hand. Composing or performing music was not encouraged for women of her time. Wolfgang repeatedly wrote that nobody played his keyboard music as well as she could, and Leopold described her as “one of the most skilful players in Europe”, with “perfect insight into harmony and modulations” and that she improvises “so successfully that you would be astounded”.

Like Virginia Woolf’s imagined Shakespeare’s sister, Nannerl was not given the opportunity to thrive. And what she did create was not valued or preserved – most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries. We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss.

Director Isaac Byrne and I searched for the ghost of Nannerl, and the story she needed to tell in my one-woman play. Period-style movement transports us to the Mozarts’ time using delicate gestures, court bows and curtsies, and the language of fans.

To create the 18th-century world of opulence and of restriction, the set became an enormous dress which spills over the entire stage (designed by Magdalena Dabrowski), with a corset/panniers cage on top. Finally the hair stands as tall as Nannerl’s, after we found the right hairspray to hold it all up-up-up – and yes, it is all my own hair.

Creating music for the show was down to two composers, Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen, who chose, rather than to try to re-create Nannerl’s compositions, to portray her musical imagination, using the sounds she would have had in her ears: the fluttering of fans, tea cups, music boxes, bells, clavichords.

I’ve been touring The Other Mozart for the last two years: this month marks its 100th performance, how fitting that it will take place just a few steps away from where Nannerl performed in London as a girl.

It has been a long journey to bring Nannerl back to England after an absence of 250 years. I sometimes feel like Leopold Mozart – on a quest to show the world this brilliant Mozart.

First published at The Guardian, September 8, 2015

Two Mercedes Once Owned by Maria Callas Head for Sale in Monaco

Image courtesy ArtCurial

Two Mercedes Benz 600 limousines once belonging to the opera singer Maria Callas are to lead the sale of a vehicle collection at the French auction house Artcurial on Monday. 

Estimated to fetch between US$67,000 and US$112,000, the limousines were purchased by the singer in 1966 and 1971, and were used to shuttle her around during her European tours. One is even outfitted with a radio that can be controlled from the back seat.

The two Mercedes are part of a collection of 11 “Classic and Racing Cars from the Estate of a Friend of Maria Callas,” taking place at the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte-Carlo, Monaco.

Both cars come with the original user manuals, an insurance certificate in Callas’s name and an original service book, which specifies Callas as the first owner. 

Callas appears to have been an admirer of Mercedes and various references to the luxury cars can be found in her biographies. Her boyfriend, Aristotle Onassis, once bought her a different model by the German automaker, according to an account in Maria Callas Remembered. Other anecdotes talk of Callas’s car blocking traffic in European cities, as she was hounded by press and autograph seekers. Callas died in 1977, at which point the cars were transferred to the current owner.

Maria Callas in her 1971 Mercedes-Benz 600 limousine. Image courtesy ArtCurial

First published at Operavore, July 19, 2015, part of WQXR New York Public Radio

The mystery of the Mary Celeste... solved?

ABC Radio National

Posted 25 Jun 2015, updated 26 Jun 2015

A painting of Mary Celeste as Amazon in 1861 (possibly by Honore Pellegrin (1800–c.1870)/ Slate magazine. 

Licensed under Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

More than 140 years after the crew of the Mary Celeste vanished without a trace, Aden Rolfe has recreated their fateful voyage in A Thoroughly Wet Mess, an eight-part tale of mystery, confusion and flirtation on the high seas.

Here’s what we know. On November 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste left New York, loaded with raw alcohol, bound for Genoa. There were seven crew members aboard, as well as Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and their two-year-old daughter. The ship may or may not have had a yawl—that is, a rowboat that could double as a lifeboat—lashed over the main hatch.

No matter how you look at it, though, you find yourself confounded by the contradiction at the heart of the mystery; a captain only ever abandons a ship if there’s no other option.

A month later, on December 4, the Celeste was found drifting near the Azores, an autonomous group of islands off the coast of Portugal. The sails were run down or blown away, the hatches open, the cabins full of water. There was a sword on the deck, as well as what appeared to be bloodstains. Nine of the barrels in the hold were empty. If there had been a yawl, there wasn’t one anymore. Presumably it went the way of the crew, along with the ship’s papers, instruments and logbooks—in short, anything that might have told us where they went or why.

All that was left was a slate log, which is an hourly record of bearing, speed and wind. The last entry suggested that the ship was abandoned 10 days prior, near the island of Santa Maria.

So what happened? What led a respected, experienced captain and his trusted crew to abandon a seaworthy ship?

These are the questions that underpin A Thoroughly Wet Mess. Each of the eight episodes features the (fictional) descendants of the original captain, owner and crew of the Mary Celeste positing different theories as to what happened to their ancestors. They do this while aboard a replica of the brigantine, recreating that infamous voyage. What could possibly go wrong?

Engraving by Rudolph Ruzicka of the Mary Celeste as she was found by the Dei Gratia.

The answer, of course, is everything. Not long after boarding the Mary Celeste II the protagonists, Sophie and Marc, realise that things are not what they seem. Between the mysterious page slipped through their door and whatever the captain’s hiding in the cargo hold, they find themselves at the centre of a twofold mystery. If they can solve the events of the present, will they unlock the secrets of the past? Or will they succumb to the same fate as their ancestors?

The series takes place entirely aboard the replica ship, with flashbacks to the original vessel, playing on the apparent simplicity of the Mary Celeste mystery. It’s this simplicity that still captivates amateur sleuths 140 years later; ten people disappeared, but the ship was unscathed. If the answer’s anywhere, it’s on those hallowed decks. Like a locked room puzzle or a lateral thinking question, it’s just about looking at it from the right angle.

What’s interesting is that a number of the more plausible solutions can be dismissed on evidence, while some of the more outlandish possibilities are difficult to disprove. Piracy, for instance, is typically disregarded because neither the passengers’ valuables nor the ship’s cargo were pilfered, while it’s hard to say for certain that a giant squid didn’t pluck the crew members one by one from the deck. Or that aliens didn’t do much the same thing. Or that the ship didn’t get beached on a sand bank in the middle of the Atlantic, thereby enticing the crew to disembark and explore it, only to have the temporary island recede, drowning the hapless group.

No matter how you look at it, though, you find yourself confounded by the contradiction at the heart of the mystery; a captain only ever abandons a ship if there’s no other option, if he and his charges are in grave danger. Yet whatever danger Captain Briggs thought was about to befall them, it never came to pass. After they deserted the ship, she managed to sail herself unaided for some 278 miles, over 10 days, without sinking or exploding or passing through a wormhole.

It’s these details that have helped usher the Mary Celeste from mystery into myth, inspiring writers and dramatists for a century and a half. Before he created Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle provided a possible ‘solution’ to the mystery in his short story, J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement. Detailing the hijacking of the ship by a black liberationist, Doyle’s story was intended as fiction; its anonymous publication, however, led many to take it as fact.

The uncertainty Doyle was able to create, despite spelling the name of the ship incorrectly—Marie rather than Mary—and changing dates and details to suit his storytelling, laid the groundwork for more audacious hoaxes, such as Abel Fosdyk’s Story and the accurately named Great Mary Celeste Hoax, both presented as true accounts of survivors.

More fun than these are the unashamed fictions, like The Goon Show’s take—‘The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Solved)’— which, like A Thoroughly Wet Mess, also features a replica Mary Celeste.

So where does A Thoroughly Wet Mess fit in the lineage of Mary Celeste stories? Does it present a genuine solution to the mystery or is it just another tale fuelled by the myth? There’s only one way to find out...

Episode one begins on Radiotonic on Friday, June 26, 2015 at 11am.

First published at ABC News RN, June 25, 2015, updated June 26